Page 32 - Art Review

8 Ahmet Öğüt, Information Power to the People, 2017, bronze sculpture.
© the artist. Courtesy Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam,
and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

9 Danh Vo, She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene, 2009, mixed media,
97 × 55 cm. Photo: Jean-Daniel Pellen . Courtesy Collection Chantal Crousel, Paris

mering abstractions that from a distance look up how such events don’t reach a wider public. nostalgia for Top Gun soundtrack fans. Fast-
like diverse graphs, close-up look like hard Another side of Öğüt’s practice finds ways forward to now, though, and it chimes sombrely
work and somewhere in between suggest cold in which, conversely, it might yet do so, from with #icantbreathe and activism against racial
mass production made consolingly charmed. The Silent University – a workshop-driven violence. All of this feels indivisible from the
8 In 2010 Ahmet Öğüt auctioned a self- ‘knowledge exchange platform’ for refugees, Vietnam-born, Berlin-based Danish artist’s
portrait on canvas that was also designed for also established in 2012 – to public sculpture. consideration of power structures, colonialism,
interaction: titled Punch This Painting, it was sold While Others Attack (2016) was a sequence of six capitalism and authorship, which tends to
under the condition that it might be ‘punched bronze sculptures memorialising the moments be anchored in the twists of his biography.
by whoever feels like punching it every time when protesters during worldwide historical Capsuling Vo’s diverse practice, the show incor-
it is exhibited’. Since then the Turkish artist protests were attacked by police dogs (not porates early works such as Vo Rosaco Rasmussen
has only gotten more confrontational, and less shown), and another bronze shows up in No (2003–05), wherein the artist married and
interested in the niceties of art. In 2012’s Let Protest Lost, his current survey in Copenhagen, divorced friends in order to accumulate further
it be known to all persons here gathered, for the commemorating hacktivist American Aaron surnames, forming a patchwork polyglot
Liverpool Biennial, he had a rider on horseback, Swartz, who committed suicide while under history; later pieces considering the effects of
dressed as a postman, travel from Manchester federal indictment in 2013, aged twenty-six. US policy in Southeast Asia, such as thank-you
to the host city, carrying a supposedly royal 9 A few short years ago, the title of Danh Vo’s notes from Henry Kissinger and the chandelier
letter and stopping in towns along the way, 15-year survey at the Guggenheim, Take My that hung above the 1973 Paris Peace Accords
not to advertise the biennale but to point Breath Away, might have scanned as light 80s that ended the Vietnam War; and, very probably,

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