Danh Vo

Danh Vo’s conceptual, installation-based practice dissects the cultural forces and private desires that shape our experience of the world. He often employs found objects, images and texts to animate personal narratives that refract global political histories. Published to accompany the most comprehensive museum survey to date of the Danish artist’s work, this catalog presents for the first time an illuminating overview of Vo’s work from the past 15 years.

Organized around nearly 30 major projects and installations, the volume ranges from Vo’s early performative works such as Vo Rosasco Rasmussen (2003), in which he married and divorced acquaintances in order to add their surnames to his own, to his recent sculptural hybrids of classical and Christian statuary. A lead essay by Katherine Brinson probes the artist’s roving, research-based process in which historical study, fortuitous encounters and personal relationships are woven into psychologically potent tableaux. Significant recurring subjects include the legacy of colonialism and the fraught status of the refugee, as well as the image of the United States in its own collective imagination and in that of the world.

Danh Vo lives and works in Mexico City and Berlin. He represented Denmark at the 2015 Venice Biennale and received the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize, for which he developed the project I M U U R 2 at the Guggenheim Museum (2013). Vo’s major solo exhibitions include presentations at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015–16); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2014–15); Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2012); Artists Space, New York (2010); Kunsthalle Basel (2009); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008).

Katherine Brinson is Daskalopoulos Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Susan Thompson is Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

This catalog documents Danish conceptual artist Danh Vo’s (born 1975) first trip to Mexico, his country of birth. The volume signifies a new chapter in the artist’s work––one that examines a history of colonialism and the consequences of the rise and fall of empires.

Danh Vo's conceptual artworks and installations often draw upon elements of personal lived experience (his own, the lives of his parents and other family members) to explore broader historical, social or political themes, particularly those relating to the history of Vietnam at the close of the twentieth century. The works shown in this book—closely related to an exhibition at the Pinault Foundation in Venice—in addition to Vo's site-specific installations, include some curious old works of art from Venetian museums and collections, provocatively chosen by Vo to establish an unprecedented dialogue between past and present.