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A video shows a group of people on the banks of a river. They are occupied with the game of skipping stones. But the "river" is actually the Panama Canal. In order to carry out this deceptively simple project, Across That Place, 2008, in the Panama Canal Zone, the Slova-kian artist Roman Ondak had to confront all manner of bureaucratic hurdles--expending much logistical effort in the service of perceptual experience, in the attempt to make things visible that are not visual, including temporality and political boundaries. In the context of the exhibition, this experience was manifested as the aforementioned video, signs on the wall, and drawings, maps, newspaper clippings, and carefully written postcards in vitrines.
