Danh Vo

For more than two decades, Vo has developed a visual language grounded in displacement. He is drawn to the ways in which power shapes the subject through pleasure and pain, seduction and assimilation. His installations bring together objects, texts, and images marked by war, eros, ambition, and faith. These elements come together to illuminate how historical forces imprint themselves on bodies, materials, and personal narratives. 

Vo’s sculptures share a keen aesthetic, a fascination with the properties of materials such as wood, marble, and copper. They exhibit a sensitively composed curatorial approach. The objects function as art but also carry auras connected to their travel through time. Classical remnants, religious relics, and monumental fragments are placed in dialogue, forming stories that are intimate and overlooked. As one moves through this landscape, the objects introduce subtle shifts that shape the rhythm of the experience. The exhibition becomes a shifting constellation in which relationships between objects, geographies, and histories slowly emerge.

“What I value most in Danh Vo’s work is the space it offers the viewer,” says Rein Wolfs, Director of the Stedelijk Museum. “His installations carry emotional undercurrents—tenderness, rupture, longing—that let personal and shared histories speak to one another. He also shows how beauty can be entangled with power, capable of seducing yet also unsettling.”

The exhibition πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα) marks Vo’s return to the Stedelijk, following an early presentation in 2008. His upcoming show at the museum will be an open arrangement in which relations, fragments, and tensions meet. Here, the act of looking becomes a form of remembering, and in Vo’s hands remembering is always a political act.

Curated by Rein Wolfs and Claire van Els, in close collaboration with the artist.