Danh Vo: Good Life at Isabella Bortolozzi

Danh Vo is a subtle detective. Embarrassingly exact the 32-year-old artist secures the tracks of his own life. The Vietnamese grown up in Denmark often puts out the clues himself: Documents with his name and state seals. Certificates of marriage or the police stamp of a theft announcement, framed on the wall the reports of his life becomes for Vo "selfportraits".

As everybody knows, detectives work with pleasure on the edge of the legal and appropriate what does not belong to them; it's appropriation – Thus it well fits in the picture that Danh Vo steals a valuable piece in an amorous hour from his lover and declares this act in writing as a piece of art.

His newest artistic project is the picture archive of the American Jo. In the installation Good Life the artist presents - in glass cabinets in wall - Polaroids he got from the 80-year-old, who was first stationed in Vietnam in 1962 for military purposes. Being provoked by the American view of the land of his forefathers, Danh Vo shows that the snapshots of the stranger are no documentation of the horror, rather they show Vietnamese men holding hands. Quickly we try to equate work and the artist's biography.

However, Vos artistic "Crossover" transformes the biographical I into a multifunctional authorship. This resolves in the work like the sugar in the tea or the author in the text. What is it then now, what portrays itself here? Autobiography and authorship or social methods and cultural identity? Not only the artist becomes the detective, but also the viewer who tries to solve the riddle of the works.

30. april - 02. juni 2007

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