Art Metropole

#09144

Ultimo Bagaglio

Artists

Ken Lum and Hubert Damisch

Date

2008

Format

Multiples

Size

28 × 33.5 × 7.5 cm

Artist Ken Lum and writer Hubert Damisch change roles and swap ideas in this delightful 21st century update of the Duchampian boite en valise. The object, a book and suitcase, contains a meditation on traveling and memory by Damisch, and a selection of objects suggested by Ken Lum, and sourced in Europe and North America. Traveling, writing, thought, and the storing of memory are alluded to in what appears like a surgeon’s kit. The Roman writer Cicero once suggested locating the points of an orated speech around different objects remembered in a room, in his famous text on the art of rhetoric. In the hands of Lum and Damisch, the difference between objects and writing is elided, much in the way that their symbiotic artistic collaboration has united historically opposed professions. The future of art history—and art—might be said to reside in this little box of treasures.

Concept: Hubert Damisch, Ken Lum
Design: Ken Lum
Box manufactured by Dermont-Duval, Paris
Packaging by Star-Pack, Boissy l’Aillerie, France

Produced in an edition of fifteen copies, with nine artists’ proofs.

Each book is signed and numbered by the artist and author.