‘I'm fascinated by how we are intertwined with our technology,’ says Es Devlin when we meet at her London studio to discuss her partnership with BMW, with whom she is debuting a new series of installations set to debut at Art Basel 2024 (13-16 June).
‘BMW genuinely want to facilitate an actual meeting of minds, and that's what attracted me to this collaboration, which we have been talking about since 2017,’ she adds. ‘We have been waiting to find a genuine overlap of my lines of inquiry with their lines of inquiry. And this is the one.’ For her new works, encompassing sound, music and light, Devlin has been inspired by her time with BMW’s engineers and their work to make hydrogen a prime energy source for their electric vehicles. ‘It started with these conversations with the engineers, and then the work you see at the booth [in Art Basel] is very personal, looking back to my first memory, which was this line of light through water. That's how we begin the work in Basel. So I feel that the collaboration has allowed me to really continue my journey as an artist, as well as overlapping with these engineers.’
