ALEKS DANKO

Born 1950 in Adelaide, Australia. Lives and works in Daylesford, Australia.

Aleks Danko CULTURAL MEDITATION, 1949-2010; A birch tree in a field did stand, 2006, gouache and pencil on paper, 78.5 x 108.5 cm framed. Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Aleks Danko is an Australian conceptual artist whose work since the 1970s has utilised sardonic humour to interrogate the cultural and political landscape as well as the diasporic experience of settlement. He was born in Adelaide and lived in Sydney before settling outside of Melbourne in Daylesford. His experience of growing up as the child of Ukrainian migrants in 1950s Adelaide has fed into works that look at middle-Australian suburban values with a critical and ironic eye, using the icons and narratives of Australian history as source material.

Danko’s works take the various forms of installation, performance, sculpture, public commission and wall works, with a predominance of text. His major work, Songs of Australia, of which there are 16 ‘volumes’, was first exhibited in 1996 – initiated at the time when a conservative Australian federal government was installed. The final volume, subtitled SHHH, GO BACK TO SLEEP (an un-Australian dob-in mix) (2004) comprised simple, red child-like houses on poster-sized sheets of paper that plastered the walls surrounding a black house-like structure, lit with flashing lights, and broadcasting a soundtrack of suavely-read but banal statements drawn from the rhetoric of politicians, the media and common utterance. Phrases such as ‘Beautiful One Day, Perfect the Next’; ‘Mate’; and ‘A fair go, having a go pulling together’ were overlaid on the drawings, in an example of Danko’s use of language to investigate submerged but nonetheless dominant ideologies.

SOME CULTURAL MEDITATIONS 1949–2010 (2010), shown in Sydney, is an ongoing work that looks at cultural and personal memory from a different point of view. Danko has taken an embroidered cushion as a central motif in the installation and a symbol marking a significant point in his family history – in 1949 his parents, Aleksander and Maria, arrived in Australia as refugees from war-damaged Europe. A photograph was taken that year of the artist’s mother and her friends at the Woodside Army Camp and Migrant Hostel in South Australia. The women shown in the picture all took turns to embroider the cushion that forms the starting point of the installation; it is shown resting across their laps in the black-and-white image and was taken while Maria was pregnant with the artist. In a series of intricate gouache and pencil drawings, Danko has ‘remade’ the cushion as a homage to the memory of his parents and their cultural traditions. The drawings, each taking around one month to execute, represent a labour of thought on migration and the experiences of lives that have been displaced and transformed. Each element in the installation – the drawings, the 1949 photograph, the original cushion, a text by an Adelaide-based cultural anthropologist – presents a meditation on different aspects of selfhood. The titles (Oh! Beautiful moonlit night) reference phrases from Ukrainian and Russian folk songs that are also present in the form of a soundtrack of seven songs that Danko’s father used to sing along to at home, played by the Soviet Red Army Chorus and Band (1958–1963).

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘CHATTER … and more chatter upstairs’, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia
2009 ‘It’s Such a Thin Line Between Clever and Stupid’, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
2006 ‘Some Cultural Meditations 1949–2006’, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
2005 ‘A Sing Song of Never Seven Ever/Ever’, Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, Australia
2004 ‘Songs of Australia Volume 16: Shhh, Go Back to Sleep (an un-Australian dob-in mix)’, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (travelling exhibition)

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Why do we do the things we do’, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Australia
2009 ‘MCA Collection: New Acquisitions’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
2008–09 ‘Contemporary Australia: Optimism’, Gallery of Modern Art/Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia
2006 ‘Proof: Contemporary Australian Prints’, The Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
2004 ‘International 04’, 3rd Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK

Selected Bibliography

David Burnett, ‘What Time Is It?’, Brought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art 1966 –2006, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2006
Kelly Gellatly, ‘Singing the Song of Australia’ and Bruce James, ‘Man-Boy with Guitar’, Aleks Danko, Songs of Australia Volume 16: Shhh, Go Back to Sleep (an un-Australian dob-in mix), The Song Cycle Volumes 1–16, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004
Niko Papastergiadis ‘Dissecting the New Australian Authoritarianism’, Broadsheet, June–August 2004, vol. 33, no. 3, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 2004
Kate Ravenswood, ‘Humour as a weapon’, Contemporary Australia: Optimism, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2008