Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Danh Võ
Danish, Vietnamese; 21st-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum (Exhibition: Danh Vo: πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα))
29%
πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα). 2026. Exhibition/installation
Võ's exhibition, which ought to be considered in toto as an individual artwork, comprises maybe twenty appropriation-sculptures whose primary material is other historical artworks, several dozen framed photographs of flowers, a number of actual flowers in clear vitrines, plain pine structures to hold this stuff up, and a lot of empty space. The installation is about how the meanings of things are contingent, subject to more or less violent transformations at the hands of politics and migration — hence the Buddha displayed with its face smushed into the floor (etc.). Võ connects this (frankly very basic) semiotic observation to personal and world-historical narratives, which gives the work a sentimental tinge. The openness of the display and the delicacy of the woodworking, juxtaposed with various politically and/or emotionally charged objects plus the plain pictures of flora, enhances the sentimental effect — it's all airy and nostalgic and rather noncommittal. Pointing out that meaning isn't fixed, especially in a fine art context, is trite (we know, Danh); implying that this has something special to do with recent global society is ideological. And so Vō's work seems to say little more than "dust in the wind, dude," and to do so in an annoying tone of vague admonition. It goes about saying this by means of so many objects (flowers, sculptures, photos, space itself) that would have offered much more to thought and to experience outside of this context he's built for them. The curse of distanced brainy poetic institutional artists like Võ is that they tend to take seriously neither their own art and ideas, nor the art and ideas which they use as the building blocks of their own art. (Plus, so much here relies thoughtlessly on the curators’ writing.) (TFS, 2026)