Danh Vo

The narrow entrance to Vietnam-born, Berlin-based Danh Vo’s “Uterus” is adorned with fourteen sheets of paper, recessed behind glass and backlit, titled Untitled (The Collection of Leonard Lyons Letters from Henry Kissinger), 2008. Purchased by the artist at auction, they were sent from Kissinger to the New York Post’s Broadway columnist during the US bombing of Cambodia. In one letter, which includes a shockingly offhand mention of covert operations during the Vietnam War, Lyons is thanked for his gifts of theater and ballet tickets as welcome distractions. Sensation is not Vo’s aim, however; instead he draws attention to the material qualities of these historical artifacts, such as how the light shining through the paper reveals the official White House watermark. It is as if, regardless of their content, they could be regarded sculpturally, in their dumb facticity.

The heterogeneous objects scattered throughout the rest of the exhibition suggest, per the title, a site for gestating ideas or interpretations—but here one must be cautious. That Vo’s family left Vietnam by boat when he was four is invariably mentioned in appraisals of his work, yet this exhibition, curated by Susanne Ghez, confounds biographical readings. If the floor-bound iron animal traps set of Twenty-Two Traps, 2012, read as inherited war trauma, they also suggest ensnarement via the predictable tethering of the “global” artist to his or her locality or origin. Accompanying the exhibition around Chicago—at the Art Institute and elsewhere on the University of Chicago campus—are copper casts of pieces of the Statue of Liberty, part of Vo’s We the People, 2010–13. Hulking, shining, left on the ground in fragments, they multiply associations, constantly exceeding their source.