DANIEL ARSHAM (B. 1980)

Future Relic No. 04 - Cassette Tape

plaster and crushed glass sculpture in the original box

sculpture: 4 × 2 1/2 × 1/2 inches (10.2 × 6.4 × 1.3 cm)

Executed in 2015. This work is number 287 from an edition of 500.

PROVENANCE:

Acquired directly from the artist

NOTES:

Daniel Arsham is a New York-based artist whose practice bridges architecture, archaeology, and pop cultural detritus. Known for transforming familiar objects into eroded artifacts, Arsham casts relics of the recent past as if unearthed from a future civilization.

Future Relic No. 04 – Cassette Tape is part of his iconic Future Relic series, which imagines everyday 20th-century items as archaeological discoveries. Cast in white hydrostone with pulverized glass, the sculpture captures a cassette mid-disintegration—its once-functional form now ghosted, calcified, and crumbling.

At once precise and poetic, the piece reflects Arsham’s ongoing meditation on obsolescence, memory, and time. In an era defined by digital ephemera, the cassette becomes a symbol of tactile intimacy and lost ritual—a monument to a culture already half-forgotten.