The work “Les Fleurs d’intérieur” (which gives its name to the exhibiton presented at Kadist Art Foundation from May 30 to July 13, 2009) is a brass plate engraved with the inventory list of the works included in the show. From this moment, Dahn Vo will use this brass plates as a systematic element for all his exhibitions.
Danh Vo’s personal history of migration and adjustment is an important reference point for his artistic practice. In his work, he explores themes ranging from identity, authorship, sexuality, and ownership to origin. He uses intimate, personal material to show that identity is a construction of projections, assumptions and attributed values. Vo embarks upon a subtle investigation of the Western fascination for the exotic and unknown with an exquisite conceptual style. For Vo, appropriating the history of others is a way of unraveling monolithic ideas about identity. And he does so with great verve, generally initiating the journey with himself. In addition to his classifiable works, a certain mystified aura lingers around his actions: the artist has married, and subsequently divorced numerous people simply to add their names to his list, he has committed “crimes” later displaying their documentation as show, for example. In his installations he uses objects, photos and documentation that connects his family history to real memories intertwined with a complex imaginary. His refugee status has led him to attempt to reconstruct various derivations of identities, origins, and stories. This requires the questioning of social structures, the endorsement of different identities, the questioning of values, and the undermining of conventions in order set forth a groundwork for his personal depiction in the world of society at large. Born in 1975, Danh Vo is a Danish artist with Vietnamese origins. He lives and works in Berlin.
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The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
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At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
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Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
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Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face...
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure...
A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China...