Danh Vō
All that prevents you from leaving, all that is your enemy
23 May—20 September 2026
Kunsthal 44Møen, Askeby, Denmark
Danh Vō was born in Vietnam in 1975 and grew up in Denmark. His practice resembles that of a collector or archaeologist. He often works with found, historical objects, which he reworks or presents in new contexts. The artist’s personal history is interwoven with broader questions of politics, religion and cultural identity. Meaning is not stable: things, people, and cultures are always in transit, on their way to somewhere else, to something different.
The exhibition traces migration, faith, sexuality, and memory with materials that seem caught between dissolution and transformation. Bronze religious sculptures appear as cracked fragments that have lost their authority. Their fissures make room for living fungi, for decay and rebirth. The sacred form is made vulnerable like a body, and history reveals itself as something living. The exhibition’s title comes from a text that Vō found inscribed in the home of a French missionary to Vietnam. It suggests that earthly attachments stand in the way of spiritual pursuits.
Pietà is Italian for mercy or compassion. It is also the name of a classical motif in Christian art depicting the Virgin Mary holding the dead Jesus on her lap. In this Late Gothic, German wood-carved Pietà, the emaciated Christ and heavily-robed Mary seems captured by a dominant, bronze female torso. The bronze is cast by Vō from a marble sculpture of Venus, Roman Goddess of Love and Victory, dating from the 1st century CE. When the Christians rose to power in Rome, statues of the Gods were routinely destroyed or defaced. The Renaissance saw a reclamation of classical art to Christian religious iconography. Venus here seems locked in a revenge ritual: her bronze ‘armor’ peels out and extends over the tragic faces of the Pietà, disappearing them. Vo likes to challenge the traditional veneration of icons, foregrounding the tension between bodies, doubt, and faith.
