This work, co-presented by the M Art Foundation and Vitamin Creative Space, was showcased at the 5th edition of SEA Focus, a world, anew, Singapore.
Featured in the inaugural “Collaborations” section of SEA Focus 2023 at Tanjong Pagar Distripark in Singapore, it functioned as a fertile ground to encourage institutional and cross-industry collaborations. This initiative empowers artists and galleries to realize more daring and expansive works, seeking to unlock new possibilities and reinvigorate the broader art community.
“Danh Vo’s life’s journey has given him a broad range of experiences to draw on as he examines questions of significance and purpose. In the process, the artist has continuously explored how the practice of contemporary art can elucidate the relationship between art and life.
Three works featured—Untitled (2021), Untitled (2020), and Untitled (2012-2022)— together hint at the relationship between ideology, craft, and the changes over time in art mediums. They represent a richly significant journey through time,
from the Roman Empire to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the rise of “Modernity”—and on to the present.
The forms of these objects and their particular materiality derive from the combination of the collective consciousness of different periods of time and the changes in techniques that took place amid them. Ideological evolution (from ancient Roman religion, Christianity, and humanism to colonialism and capitalism) is deeply imbedded in the formal characteristics of these sculptures. Intriguingly, over the course of two millennia, the materials available to artists have grown evermore light, from marble to wood to inexpensive cardboard. Thus do we enter into a labyrinth of time and space, seeking direction amid the complex relationships that humans have constructed between bodies and ideas, ideologies and techniques.
To Danh Vo, the most shareable public space is in fact located within each individual’s physical body. When these three sculptures are considered together, Danh Vo’s artistic practice draws us in with powerful momentum, forming an expanding field and a distinctive public space that invites us to contemplate, confront, and explore the hidden dimensions of our lives. If each unique individual is able to grasp some of the various aspects of this invitation, then we are all able to glimpse the artist’s distinctive vision of the meaning of freedom.”
– Text from Vitamin Creative Space
Danh Vo (b. 1975, Bà Rja, Vietnam) is a Danish-Vietnamese artist currently based in both Berlin and Mexico. At the age of four, Vo’s family fled Vietnam in a homemade boat, later rescued at sea by a Danish freighter. Raised in Denmark, he pursued his education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (1998-2002) and the Städelschule in Frankfurt (2002-2005). In addition to his artistic pursuits, Vo is actively engaged in a farm-housing project located outside Berlin in Güldenhof. His work consistently explores themes of identity, belonging, authority, ownership, the significance of personal relationships, and other conditions shaping human existence in contemporary times. Danh Vo’s major solo exhibitions include “Danh Vo oV hnaD” at The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2020); “Danh Vo: Untitled” at South London Gallery, London (2019); “Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint” at M+, Hong Kong (2018); “Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away” at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and SMK, Copenhagen (2018); “Banish the Faceless / Reward your Grace” at Palacio de Cristal, Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015-2016); “We The People (detail) 2010-2013” at Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2012); and “Package Tour” at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008). He represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale in 2015 with the exhibition “Mothertongue” and has been featured in the 2013 and 2019 editions. Vo is the recipient of the Arken Art Prize, Ishøj, Denmark (2015), Hugo Boss Prize (2012), and the BlauOrange Kunstpreis der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisen Bank, Berlin (2007).
