British artist Abigail Reynolds got into quite a few scrapes on her BMW Art Journey last year, when she visited and chronicled 16 libraries lost over the centuries along the Silk Road. In Egypt, she was arrested by plain clothes police while filming near Tahrir Square in Cairo (Egyptian officials released her after a few hours, but made her open the Bolex camera exposing her film to the light). In Turkey, she came off the bike while negotiating a series of hairpin bends in the mountains above Ephesus. “The bike slipped and fell on top of me. The locals helped me back on and I eventually made my way to the hotel,” she tells us. What happened next proved a tonic. “The hotel manager handed me a key to the hammam and insisted I take a restorative bath. Next he gave me a blue enamel teapot of a herbal brew, which I carried to my room under a starlit Turkish sky.” For an insight into Reynolds’s epic odyssey, pop along to the BMW Lounge at Art Basel in Hong Kong (until 25 March) where works linked to her art journey, including lattice-like screens and 16mm films, are on display.
