DANIEL ASHAM
DANIEL ARSHAM
Characterized by an uchronic aesthetic, the works of multidisciplinary artist Daniel Arsham are currently one of the most interesting things you can discover. Born and raised in Miami, now based in New York, Arsham deftly walks the line connecting art, architecture and performance.We decided to delve into his work through 4 of his most resonant projects and collaborations, starting from the beginning of his career and ending with his latest work.A graduate of Cooper Union in New York City, where he received the Gelman Trust Fellowship Award in 2003, Arsham has always shown an interest in everything related to the manipulation and distortion of objects and spaces, leading them to have appearances that they should not have or that, in any case.
Daniel Arsham and dance: Merce Cunningham’s Dance Company & Jonah Bokaer. The characteristics of his work, and the questions it raises in the eye of the beholder, led him in 2004 to receive interest first from Gallerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris, which now represents him, and then from the legendary Merce Cunningham’s Dance Company.
With the latter he began a collaboration, which lasted for several years, during which he supervised the stage design of performances that toured the world, and the former stage is now part of the permanent collection of The Walker Museum.
Nel 2007 ha cominciato a collaborare, sempre nell’ambito della danza, anche con Jonah Bokaer, ex ballerino della Merce Cunningham, coreografo e mixed media artist. Con lui ha ideato “REPLICA”, un progetto che, tramite l’utilizzo di architettura e luci, simulava la perdita della memoria e delle facoltà percettive.
Sempre con Bokaer, nel 2010, Arsham ha dato vita a “Why Patterns”, parte del più grande progetto Snarkitecture.Daniel Arsham and Snarkitecture
In 2007, with partner and architect Alex Mustonen, he set up one of the most relevant projects of our years, and he did so with the intention and goal of increasingly expanding the boundaries between the disciplines he studied.
Snarkitecture, whose name comes from Lewis Carroll’s humorous poem “The Hunting of The Snark,” which describes the “impossible journey of an unlikely crew in search of an inconceivable creature,” is a design studio that encompasses the creation of large-scale projects that are a mix of art, architecture and performance.
With a conceptual approach focused on the importance of experience and the reinterpretation of materials, Arsham and Mustonen create works that are unexpected moments, inviting people to explore, lose themselves and engage with them. Some of their most memorable installations include Dig, from 2011, with which Arsham explores the architecture of excavations; The Beach, from 2015, a reproduction of a beach inside the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Alfred States, from 2018, installed inside the historic Electoral Office Building in Milan to explore the 3 changing states of water; the Fun House, also from 2018, the installation that re-imagines the idea of the traditional house; and Sway, from 2019, a participatory installation composed of mirrors and 150 white spheres that can move and change due to the movement of visitors
