Windy

Co-commissioned by High Line Art and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, artist Meriem Bennani’s first public sculpture, Windy (2022) was installed on the High Line at 24th Street and remained on view until May 2023. Bennani’s project marked the first time High Line Art and Audemars Piguet Contemporary was co-curating and commissioning a public sculpture. The curators from High Line Art and Audemars Piguet Contemporary worked closely together with Bennani and High Line Art’s expert team of fabricators to bring this ambitious artwork to life.

Born in Morocco and based in New York City, Bennani is best known for her video and installation work that tell stories about human behavior and our experiences both on and offline. Her works blend references from reality TV, cartoons, documentary film, and social media, often with a humorous and absurdist touch. A new direction for Bennani’s practice, Windy translates her command of film and animation into a kinetic 3-D sculpture that alludes to movement represented in her video work.

Breaking norms of traditional static sculpture, Windy is a motorized spinning tornado that will rotate at varying speeds for a full year. Standing at just over nine feet tall, the sculpture is made from approximately 200 stacked foam disks. Electrical bike motors comprise the spine of the sculpture and connect to each section of foam layers. Each engine is uniquely programmed by the artist so all sections spin at varying speeds and sequences, creating unique loops that never repeat. In this way, Windy reflects Bennani’s video practice: the time sequences of a multi-channel video installation where each screen is on its own, unsynchronized loop.