Daniel Arsham: Venice 3024
Exhibiting at Fondamenta Santa Caterina, Venice during the city’s Biennale Arte, Daniel Arsham transports viewers from the past and present into the future, transforming artefacts and images that hold significant influence to comment on and memorialize the permanence of collective cultural memory.
Transporting viewers from the past and present into the future, Daniel Arsham transforms artefacts and images that hold significant influence to comment on and memorialize the permanence of collective cultural memory. In this exhibition, the artist introduces new techniques to his Fractured Idols series alongside a survey of artwork in his signature Fictional Archaeology series.
Photography: Martyn White
Central to the exhibition, Arsham debuts two new work styles from his Fractured Idols series. Situated in the apse of the Chiesa di Santa Caterina, a large-scale bronze and stainless steel sculpture oversees the larger installation. In this body of work, the artist joins seemingly recognizable personas from anime, cartoons and Antiquity, transforming the images through artificial intelligence and recreating and juxtaposing these fictionalized portraits. The artist also debuts a collaboration with Italian design company Bisazza, introducing a new suite of mosiac works in glass.
Throughout the cathedral, Arsham presents a suite of sculptures inspired by artworks from Antiquity. In collaboration with the historic Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais (RMN), a 200-year-old French moulding atelier, Arsham was able to use moulds and scans of some of the most iconic works from the collections of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, among others. Arsham recreates these historic works in his signature geological materials and bronze. Interested in the way that objects move through time, the works selected by Arsham are so iconic that they have eclipsed their status as mere art objects and instead have embedded themselves into our collective memory and identity.
