Running alongside his retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Olafur Eliasson will be addressing elements of architecture and design in his latest project: ‘Your Tempo’.
Your Tempo
Eliasson explores alternative strategies and perspectives on objects we manufacture and how they structure our relationship to the world. ‘My research tries to attune our attention to the moving world and the consequences to our actions’, the artist explains.
The exhibition centres on the ‘Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R' project, Eliasson’s collaboration with BMW’s Art Car program. Heralded as BMW’s most daring Art Car to date, Eliasson has taken the record-breaking hydrogen powered BMW H2R racing car and totally deconstructed it. By removing the car’s outer shell, he has reduced it’s bare bones and covered it with a translucent skin of steel mesh and reflective panels, which were then covered in two tonnes of ice thus rendering it immobile. For a detailed exploration of how the concept and production of the project evolved see the video above.
By transforming an object of advanced industrial design into a work of art, Eliasson critically and poetically addresses the relationship between global warming and the automotive industry. ‘Your Tempo’ effectively summons the collective sense of vulnerability we feel in an era of accelerating climate change.
In his combining of ice and a car whose main fuel source is hydrogen, Eliasson’s work challenges the viewer to think about the environmental detriment created through the disappearing polar regions and ice caps threatened by global warming, which is largely caused by car emissions.
‘Eliasson’s transformation of the H2R car is a powerful provocation to design and a reminder of the profound effect design can have on our lives,’ show curator Henry Urbach remarks. ‘It’s an experiment, really, as much as a social and political intervention as an aesthetic one.’ Through his grand artistic statement, Eliasson both engages the audience on a visual basis, and makes the viewer question their relationship between these horrific global changes and our individual acts.
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