Fondazione Querini Stampalia in collaboration with White Cube has invited the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo to co-curate a project alongside Chiara Bertola, curator of the contemporary art programme at Querini Stampalia, to coincide with this year’s Venice Biennale. Placing his own works alongside that of the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and Korean painter Park Seo-Bo, the three artists engage collectively across the spaces of this unique building.
The history of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia is also that of the Venetian noble Querini family, who lived in this palace for generations, accumulating a vast array of objects, books and works of art. This collection was made available for public enjoyment with the birth of the Foundation in 1869. The complex architectural layout of the mansion continuously opens windows onto history; alterations to the building signal new epochs, while traces of past histories are rewritten, overwritten, or erased in the process. A palimpsest of both the grand and minimal gestures of successive generations, the space is a labyrinthine experience, conversely audacious and humble.
No artist is better equipped than Vo to cross this threshold. Vo is capable of making new stories from the fog of memory and the weight of history. His work with found objects and architectural spaces reveals a sensitivity to time as it connects with each of us. Vo redeploys his works in new arrangements across his exhibitions so that different contexts shape and alter the viewer’s perception of them. Vo’s art is conditional: together with history it inscribes itself on distinct spaces and cultures making an uneasy dance of beauty and power.
Entering the Fondazione via a side door, Vo’s footsteps follow a subtle conceptual route. It is a way of navigating the nuanced and challenging questions that arise when a contemporary artist exhibits in a historical museum. What can and should be added? What comparisons and juxtapositions can be made? What balance and productive instabilities are expressed? How to bring the new into play with the old? The artist has installed light and temporary walls, agile structures that indicate a route and at the same time are responsive to the evolution of the building. In conversation with the rich array of past art on display at the Fondazione including the Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Vo introduces work from his own oeuvre and that of Isamu Noguchi and Park Seo-Bo.