Gabi Dao

Gabi Dao is an artist and organizer currently based between Rotterdam, The Netherlands and the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ Nations (Vancouver, Canada). Dao’s practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound, and moving image installations with an insistence on multiple truths, blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations, and ways of knowing otherwise. They work through long-gestating, fluid processes of gathering, breaking and repairing from their own world-making vernacular of audio/visual fragments, tactile collections of whatnots and scraps of linguistic detritus. Thinking with these materials, their work often begins within the slippages of “history,” archives and storytelling—towards channeling the ineffable tensions between grief and joy, alienation and belonging, dissidence and complicity, disassociation and sentimentality. From this juncture, Dao attempts to reclaim and re-enchant meaning-making from the ruins of capitalism and colonialism, especially in the ways they have extracted from racialized, gendered and more-than-human communities. They also host intimate, olfactory “readings” through Scent Bar, which operates adjacently to their slow, small-batch perfume business, PPL’S PERFUME. At CAG, Dao was a preparator, 2015–2017, and Assistant Curator of Learning and Public Education, 2018–2019.