Olafur Eliasson Turns BMW H2R Into Frozen Art Car

Don't adjust your monitor, there's a car in these pictures, it's just hidden under steel and ice. Olafur Eliasson intended this H2R to comment on the frosty relationship between cars and climate change.

Olafur Eliasson "Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project"

Eliasson's project transforms an object of advanced industrial design into a work of art that critically and poetically reflects on the relationship between global warming and the automotive industry. The BMW H2R race car, a hydrogen-powered vehicle, was developed to attain speed records while pursuing a sustainable future based on the use of regenerative fuel. Eliasson has removed the car's outer shell and replaced it with a complex, translucent skin made of steel mesh, reflective steel panels, and many layers of ice.

"Our movement in space implies friction: not only wind resistance, but also social, physical, and political frictions," Eliasson comments. "Thus, movement has consequences for self-perception and the way we engage with the world. One can look at the body as a mobile vessel or a vehicle that changes the parameters of time and space. In driving a car, one obviously also negotiates the way time-space is constructed. What I find so interesting in the research on movement and environmentally sustainable energy is the fact that it enhances our sense of responsibility in how we as individuals navigate in a world defined by plurality and polyphony."

Dr. Norbert Reithofer, Chairman of the Board of the BMW AG, commented on the three-year cooperation with the artist: »While working on his Art Car Project, Olafur Eliasson had been engaged in an intensive exchange of ideas with our engineers and designers for a number of years. Within the framework of the BMW Group's long-term commitment to art and culture, the intense discussion between the artist and our company reached beyond the boundaries of purely cultural engagement. Eliasson's work poses questions also raised by our company. Our corporate vision of sustainable mobility is based on innovative research, new technologies and the use of regenerative energy, which also secures our company's prospects for the future. We believe solutions can only be achieved when politics, industry and society all work together. And the BMW Group is proud to promote such a joint effort."

The 16th BMW Art Car by Olafur Eliasson premiered in 2007 at the San Francisco Museum of Art and was presented at Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne in 2008. On the occasion of "THE WORLD IS YOURS" and in close cooperation with the BMW Group, the Louisiana Museum will organize a symposium on December 12 pertaining to issues of sustainability and coinciding with the World Climate Conference taking place in Copenhagen around that time.

Send an email to Wes Siler, the author of this post, at wes@jalopnik.com.

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