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‘When you love, you are nailed to the cross,’ says a character in Rainer Fassbinder’s film In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) In Cigarettes, Harry Mathews’s novel published in the same year, a character finds himself quite literally crucified, replete with a crown of thorns – a consequence, and perversion, of love In Catholic theology, the idea of a love so pure as to evoke the ultimate sacrifice is approximated through the relic: a scrap of a shroud, a fragment of bone, a nail once pierced through flesh Imbued with the charge of history and the promise of salvation, these items both fuel and sustain the particular desire for proximity to holiness among believers   Pilgrims to Danh Vo’s mid-career survey at the Guggenheim Museum may find such desires pricked, teased, and thwarted by works that package the relic for the contemporary art market The Danish-Vietnamese artist, known for conceptual installations comprising rare and curiously sourced ready-mades, has been a fixture in blue-chip galleries and private collections At the Guggenheim, these objects are sparsely arranged on the museum’s winding ramp, where they are called upon to invoke grand themes: the legacy of American imperialism, and the artist’s lapsed Catholicism, among them Vo was born in Bà Ria, Vietnam toward the end of the Vietnam War, and moved with his family to a refugee camp in Singapore, settling eventually in Denmark Interspersing family photographs with artefacts from colonial Vietnam, the exhibition oscillates between intimate glimpses of the artist’s life and the sweep of history   Vo’s connection to a network of high-profile lenders has abetted a practice of skilled connoisseurship that allows the artist to impress audiences by the sheer incredulity of his acquisition Hung along the Guggenheim’s ramp is a chandelier from the former ballroom of the Hotel Majestic in Paris, where the Paris Peace Accord ending the Vietnam War was signed in 1973 In 2012, Vo acquired a group of objects from the estate of Robert S McNamara – the American secretary of defence between 1961 and 1968 – when the Vietnam War began to escalate Lot 20 Two Kennedy Administration