COLLABORATION Daniel Arsham x Rimowa
FAMED FOR HIS CRUMBLING, FULL-SIZE REPRESENTATIONS OF EVERYDAY ARTEFACTS, ARTIST DANIEL ARSHAM HAS NOW TURNED HIS ATTENTION TO A SUITCASE, WRITES JON WALL
Born in Cleveland, brought up in Miami and now based in New York, contemporary visual artist Daniel Arsham creates work that spans the spectrum between art, architecture and performance; to these eyes, many of his recent pieces also combine elements of sculpture, hyper-realism and decay.
In Hong Kong for Art Basel 2019, Arsham explained that his “broad ranging” oeuvre falls into two categories. One is “fictional archaeological works that investigate contemporary objects as if projected into the future, and the other [is] architectural manipulations, works that disrupt the surface of the object.
“I grew up in Miami,” he said, “and I saw the city evolve, and the lack of preservation of historical things. They’re constantly tearing things down and building things up, which I’m sure is the case here in Hong Kong. And there are places where this meets in the middle, where you can be building one up and tearing one down next to it, and that place in between is what interests me.”
As to the suggestion that his crumbling representations of everyday objects and cultural artefacts – such as his installation of an eroded Delorean, a car made famous in the movie Back to the Future, in pyrite and quartz – are somehow dystopian, Arsham counters that he prefers the word “inevitable. Everything that exists today will become an archaeological object, so by considering the process as inevitable gives us a different perspective on the everyday.”
Arsham is a co-founder of the multi-disciplinary New York design practice Snarkitecture, whose commercial collaborations include store interiors in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, and the BEAM Nightclub in Bangkok. Individually, he’s also worked with the likes of Pharrell Williams and Adidas, and his most recent project is a collaboration with Rimowa.
Available from May 17 in a numbered and signed limited edition of 500, the Rimowa x Daniel Arsham Eroded Suitcase is an imagined future archaeological discovery that “illustrates how new technologies can quickly become obsolete”. The irony? It’s presented in a gleaming, brandnew special-edition attaché case.