UCCA Dune

Relics of an Unknown Future: Venus in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

2020.7.10
21:00-22:15

Location:  Online
Language:  English

On July 10, artist Daniel Arsham’s sculpture Bronze Eroded Venus de Milo (2020) will be installed outdoors at Aranya. This public art project not only showcases the artist’s latest work, but also marks the first preview of his upcoming solo exhibition at UCCA Dune, to open a year later on July 10, 2021. On the day of the unveiling, UCCA Center for Contemporary is proud to invite Arsham to participate in a live stream dialogue with UCCA Director and CEO Philip Tinari, discussing his recent work, the multiple threads running through his practice, and next year’s exhibition. The artist will also take viewers on a special virtual tour of his New York City studio before the start of the discussion.

For the first-ever solo exhibition at UCCA Dune, Daniel Arsham will present a new body of work which expands upon his fascination with history and relics of the past, staged across the backdrop of the museum’s dramatic, subterranean space. Arsham has revisited iconic artworks, such as Michaelangelo’s Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino, using molds of the original sculptures to create new pieces featuring his trademark eroded-crystal style. To create these works, Arsham was granted unprecedented access to France’s Réunion des Musées Nationaux, which holds molds for sculptural masterpieces found in the collections of the Louvre and the Vatican Museums, among others. The artist’s process asks the viewer to consider the art historical tradition of unearthing, revising, and conserving works of the past, while also considering these works through the lens of a future archaeologist, rediscovering and reimagining them as relics of an unknown future. 


Event Schedule

20:30-21:00 Daniel Arsham Studio Tour

21:00-21:45 Dialogue with Daniel Arsham and Philip Tinari

21:45-22:15 Audience Questions

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Daniel Arsham(Artist)

Daniel Arsham (b. 1980, Cleveland) lives and works in New York. Arsham’s aesthetic is rooted in his concept of fictional archaeology. Working with sculpture, drawing, architecture, and film, he creates liminal situations by staging what he refers to as “future archaeology.” These works imagine a future world from which we may re-examine our present. These haunting, yet playful visions straddle romanticism and pop art. The artist’s work has been shown in many prestigious institutions, including MoMA PS1, the New Museum in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, among others.


Philip Tinari (Director, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, CEO, UCCA Group)

Since coming to UCCA in 2011, Philip Tinari has led its transformation from a founder-owned private museum into an accredited museum across multiple locations, a public foundation, and a family of art-driven enterprises. During his tenure, UCCA has mounted more than seventy exhibitions and thousands of public programs, bringing artistic voices established and emerging, Chinese and international, to an audience of over a million visitors each year. From 2009 to 2012 he founded and edited LEAP, the first internationally distributed, bilingual magazine of contemporary art in China. He is a contributing editor of Artforum and launched the magazine’s Chinese edition in 2008. Having written extensively on contemporary art in China, he was co-curator of the 2017 exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Based in Beijing since 2001 and fluent in Mandarin, Tinari is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations. He holds degrees from Duke and Harvard and is currently completing a doctorate at Oxford.