Great Exhibitions #20 – Danh Vo: πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα) @ Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

📍 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
🗓 Sunday, March 22nd, 2026
🕓 Meeting at 16:15

For the 20th edition of Great Exhibitions, we dive into one of the most powerful and thought-provoking shows currently on view in Amsterdam: Danh Vo at the Stedelijk Museum.

Born in Vietnam and raised in Denmark after fleeing the war as a child, Danh Vo’s work moves with extraordinary precision between violence and tenderness, history and intimacy, beauty and trauma. His sculptures, objects, and installations are built from fragments of the past: religious relics, classical sculptures, historical artifacts, everyday objects. Like an archaeologist, Vo excavates meanings, then reassembles them into new constellations that feel both poetic and unsettling.

In this exhibition, objects are cut, displaced, reframed, suspended, inverted. A Roman marble head meets a 19th-century torture device. A Renaissance relief is forced into a wooden soup crate. A fragment of the Statue of Liberty appears not as a symbol of promise, but of broken ideals. Across the show, Vo reflects on exile, power, colonialism, religion, ownership, and the fragile line between care and destruction.

His work doesn’t shout. It whispers, but what it says stays with you.

After the exhibition, we’ll continue the evening by exploring one of the most exciting new openings in Amsterdam’s bar scene: Shakerato, the brand-new cocktail bar by Eric van Beek, the mind behind Handshake Speakeasy in Mexico City (currently ranked #2 in the World’s 50 Best Bars, and #1 in 2024). Expect outstanding cocktails (also non-alcoholic options), great energy, and a relaxed atmosphere — plus beer and wine if that’s more your thing.

🍸 Art, history, beauty, contradictions — and a great drink to talk it all through afterwards.
Join us for an evening that moves between museum and cocktail bar, thought and pleasure, fragility and intensity.