Gabi Dao

Gabi Dao was born in 1991. They live and work from the unceded and ancestral territories of Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, Canada) and Rotterdam (NL).

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 have screened and exhibited their work and projects across Turtle Island, Asia and Europe and in 2021 they were shortlisted for Canada’s Sobey Award.

They also host intimate, olfactory ‘readings’ through Scent Bar, which operates adjacently to their slow, small-batch perfume business, PPL’S PERFUME.