Skip to main content

Danh Vo: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2019 01:05:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Conceptual Art, Interview, Performance, VDB Interviews, Visiting Artists Program

Description

Danh Vo is a Vietnamese-born Danish conceptual artist, currently living and working between Berlin and Mexico City. His large installations often deal with issues of personal identity and belonging. In conversation with Norah Taylor, an art historian specializing in South and Southeast Asian art, Vo discusses his upbringing, career, and what led him to become an artist.

"Vo’s art is also filled with moments of loveliness and provocation. He is as much a provocateur as he is an aesthete. He can be sexy, sly, funny, harrowing and heartfelt, and some of his motifs – lines taken from William Friedkin’s 1973 demonic possession movie The Exorcist, or the last letter of a Jesuit missionary, written on the day of his execution in Vietnam in 1861 – recur often enough to make us feel that there is an ongoing narrative at work. The sacred and profane, guilt and redemption play their part."

— Adrian Searle, The Extraordinary Artefacts of a Vietnam Escapee, The Guardian, September 2019

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics.