These editioned works bookend almost four decades of Australian artist Aleks Danko’s practice, illustrating his characteristic irony and deadpan humour. The earliest work here, THE DANKO 1971 AESTHETIC WITHDRAWAL KIT, implores the viewer to pull the handle, only to confront them with four plastic dividers in an otherwise empty drawer, the closest inscribed with the punchline ‘This is YOUR moment of AESTHETIC WITHDRAWAL’. Similarly good-humoured in its cynicism is the cast bronze work HEAVY AESTHETIC QUALITY – MANTELPIECE EDITION, whose raised, polished lettering and use of the word ‘heavy’ playfully connote both physical weight and conceptual seriousness.

Danko’s interest in the inherent duplicity and ironic possibilities of language, it has been suggested, may stem from a sense of linguistic and cultural dislocation he felt growing up as the only child of Ukrainian parents who fled Stalin’s regime.

Feature image: Works by Aleks Danko installed at GOMA for ‘A Kind of Library’, May 2023 / Photograph: C Callistemon, QAGOMA