Aleks DankoMy Fellow Aus-Tra-Aliens

MY FELLOW AUS-TRA-ALIENS presents artworks spanning nearly five decades of the long career of Victorian-based artist Aleks Danko, from his earliest exhibitions in the late 1960s through to his recent installations.

Born in Adelaide in 1950 to Ukrainian émigré parents, Danko began making art as a teenager in his family’s garage. After studying at the South Australian School of Art he moved to Sydney in 1971, where he was a central figure in the city’s conceptual art movement. There the young artist began his art practice as he would continue: mining the complexities of lived experience and pricking the collective social conscience, using sculpture, performance and process as his means.

Danko’s prolific output since that time has seen him working across a range of media, adding films, books and public commissions to his repertoire. In the past decade he has focused on creating a body of work which critically engages with the social, political and cultural landscape of Australia.

Danko’s constant touchstones have been language, humour, and his own history. He spoke Ukrainian and Russian before English and, perhaps as a consequence of this, sees words as malleable playthings, delighting in their spoken form and especially in the multiple meanings made possible by the double-entendre. Underlying his satire and sense of play, however, is an abiding concern for the bigger political picture. Equally, the suburbia of his upbringing—its banality, architectural conventions and seemingly anti-intellectual ethos—has been a consistent presence in his art, lending his oeuvre a strong sense of cultural ambivalence and critique.

“The consistent elements in Danko’s work are the poetic games with language and expectation, wry humour about life and death and the kind of purpose that we might try to teach one another.”

Robert Nelson, The Age, 16 December 2015

WATCH

Aleks Danko’s artworks being “activated”.

LISTEN

Aleks Danko on “the face”
Courtesy of MCA