On Manhattan’s High Line, Experimentation Leads to a Whirling, Whizzing, Whooshing Sculpture
Meriem Bennani’s “Windy” is the latest, and perhaps boldest, effort of an ambitious art initiative by the Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet.
By Mara Fisher
July 6, 2022
5 minute read
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Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirling with the fierce, relentless energy of a speeding locomotive—or, to use an apt Looney Toons analogy, the Tasmanian Devil. The arresting apparition? “Windy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd Street through May 2023. Best-known for her ambitious, often absurd videos, Bennani deftly mixes references from reality TV, cartoons, documentaries, and social media to tell stories about human behavior online and off. (Her viral video series, “2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewildering experience of isolation with uncanny precision.)
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