Danh Vo’s monumental installation at the Bourse de Commerce, Before the Storm / Avant l'Orage is an immersive feast for the mind.

 

In the heart of Paris, Les Halles, lies one of the most stellar historic buildings, a remarkable edifice that stands out for its exceptional location, rich historical legacy, and recent transformation by the celebrated Japanese architectural genius Tadao Ando.

 

With Ando’s signature concrete structure, a post-modern medium, placed in the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce, contrasting with the building that was originally sited in 16th century as a Hôtel Particulier for Catherine de Medici, the space is instantly transformed into a discourse across times.

 

This juxtaposition of historical and contemporary elements serves as a way to disrupt traditional notions of linear time and challenge dominant cultural narratives; the present is characterised by a sense of disconnection from historical time, where the past and future merge, thus forming “zones of indistinction” of Giorgo Agamben. This interplay of remnants from different epochs creates a distancing effect that engenders a sense of contemporaneity.

 

Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection presents a new scenography conceived by Danh Vo (born in 1975), an installation, crossing personal history and collective memory, and exploring the processes of construction of identities, heritage and cultural values.

 

Vo approaches the world as an archivist. Visitors once entered the space, complete the relational dialogue alongside with the exhibition. His large-scale installation of lightning struck woods scaffolded by manmade timbers are orchestrated throughout the space.

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The organic intertwined with the manufactured, the broken with the complete; setting against the backdrop of Ando’s sleek grey concrete structure and the 19th century panoramic fresco ceiling about global trades and colonisation. The work Tropeaolum by Danh Vo takes root in this greenhouse of metal, concrete and stone and creates a mutant territory, where stories shuffle different narratives and reconstructs an autonomous ecosystem. 

 

Vo arranges objects and artefacts of which he explores the symbolic and emotional charge, the power of evocation and repair. By interweaving his intimate trajectory and personal stories with larger geopolitical, social and historical issues, he questions the processes of construction of identities, heritages and transmitted values.

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For the artist of Vietnamese and Danish nationality, child of boat people who emigrated to this Scandinavian country, history concerns the present and shapes the future.  From his departure from Vietnam at age four for Denmark, Vo's personal and family experiences are the main resources of his artistic creation.

 

Through a rigorous collection, he brings together photographs, memories, fragments, objects and testimonies of his personal life. The result are installations where each object takes on meaning, questioning our representations of identity and history.

 

The work also draws its roots from the life that Vo has led, since 2017, in his studio-farm in Güldenhof, near Berlin. The artist was transformed by this new relationship to “nature”, to the garden, to Earth. Flowers, mosses, trees, plant interactions, have become very present elements of his work.

 

“I thought I would look at trees; I didn't know that I would cultivate a flower garden or a vegetable garden. A whole world opened up to me. How human beings perceive nature is the same discussion as how we perceive gender, race or whatever we have researched as a society. Identity opens up all these complex facets of what categorisation means.” Danh Vo

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I found myself standing in the centre of the Rotunda, swirled and lost with contextual meanings as well as physical forms. Vo's personal history of radical displacement, echoes the past, the fresco, and the present, in the context of further globalisation. The branches and scaffolds vary in height and motion, accentuated by shimmering lights and plants. Suddenly this feeling became self-explanatory in the title of the exhibition, Before The Storm / Avant l’Orage, and for this exact moment, I was being in The Eye of The Storm / L’œil de l’Orage.

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The exhibition is carefully curated, schematically staged, thought-provoking. The fabulous intertextuality within the presentation as well as with the building, is not to be missed.

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Danh Vo / Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris (France)

8 February - 11 September 2023

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/ Benjamin Liang

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