Artist:
Dominik Lang (born 1980, Prague, Czech Republic; lives and works in Prague, Czech Republic).

Materials:
Mixed media.

Description:
“The Sleeping City links two different scuptural approaches with various historical contexts against the background of an intimate family relationship. The presentation connects the works of two authors linked by a personal association, father and son, and thus creates a basis for developing a fictitious inter-generation dialogue. One of the project’s starting points is the fact that the works of Dominik Lang’s father, Jiří Lang (1927–1996), were ‘short-circuited’ by the absurdity of the times, i.e., of the forced uniformity of the 1950s society in the Soviet Block, and have remained—in spite of the initial laudatory epithets: ‘a good start’, ‘promising’—deposited in the author’s studio, ‘incarcerated’ in its own times. The stifling atmosphere of a studio crowded with ‘sleeping’ statues, the social insulation, resignation, and apathy, but also one particular 1960 relief, called The Sleeping City: these are the sources for the title of D. Lang’s multi-layered project.

“In his artistic work thus far, D. Lang has typically presented himself in the double role of author and architect, a role that includes manipulating already-finished material and composing new wholes out of it. In the Sleeping City project, D. Lang pushes this basic pattern towards greater complexity, a larger scope as well as a radical strengthening of personal and emotional engagement. D. Lang’s working method has thus become more effective but also more risky, as the material is no longer some object or the interior of an artistic institution, as it was before, but rather the work of another artist, and moreover one that is intimately known to him. By means of assorted objects, artistic works and assembled documents, D. Lang allows us to both enter the past and to uncover the volatile intimacy of moments opening ‘beyond time’.”
—”At the 54th Venice Biennale,” e-flux, March 31, 2011.