Madeline Hollander presents energy cycles in 2020 BMW Open Work Commission

Frieze and BMW have named Madeline Hollander as the artist selected for the 2020 BMW Open Work commission. Launched in 2017 and curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini, BMW Open Work is a major artistic initiative bringing together art, design and technology in pioneering multiplatform formats. Hollander will present the commission in two phases, as an interactive digital platform and livery intervention during Frieze Week in London 2020, and as a live, site-specific installation at Frieze Los Angeles 2021. Additionally, a series of hand-drawn animations, preparatory studies for the installation, will be shown on Frieze Viewing Room.

The three-part project emerged from Hollander’s dialogue with BMW’s sustainability department and an investigation into the automatic adaptive system of BMW headlights. The project continues the artist’s recent research into traffic patterns and working without human actors to depict unseen systems or processes.

Hollander said: ‘Sunrise/Sunset presents an immersive networked spectacle choreographed by sunsets and sunrises across the globe in real time. The piece, composed of hundreds of recycled BMW headlights, transforms an automatic adaptive system already embedded within vehicles, where headlights turn on/off and adjust accordingly in response to light sensors, into a live twinkling global map.’



Fattori Franchini said: 'Now in its fourth year, BMW Open Work has established itself as a unique moment of exchange between industrial knowledge, technology and artistic talent. Working with a thrilling artist such as Madeline Hollander, pushing the possibilities of movement to depict invisible systems or processes, brings the program into a new and exciting direction. I can’t wait for Sunrise/Sunset to unfold across different platforms revealing Hollander’s investigation into perpetual loops, energy cycles and renewable power.’

BMW Open Work by Frieze is a major artistic initiative bringing together art, design and technology in pioneering multi-platform formats. For its premier in 2017, artist Olivia Erlanger integrated a motion-sensitive sculpture, audio and immersive fog in her work “Body Electric”; in 2018, Sam Lewitt engaged with BMW intellectual property and engine production to conceptually and physically explore the production cycle of a BMW engine in “CORE (the ‘Work’)”; in 2019, Camille Blatrix collaborated with BMW Individual to explore the primal and emotional relationships to labor and materiality, raising questions about functionality and desire in the installation “Sirens”.



Visit Sunrise/Sunset at www.sunrisesunsets.world