Sculptor of light and space

OLAFUR ELIASSON, Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop discovers, gives poetic language to abstract concepts

With the creation of massive man-made waterfalls in New York and Versailles that turned rivers in various cities a luminous green and the installation of a 90m-long smoke-filled tunnel in the Arken Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen, Olafur Eliasson has become internationally known for his large-scale immersive installations and sculptures.

His works often use light or water and entice the public to actively participate in them. This month, if all goes to plan, he will place 24 massive blocks of Icelandic ice, each weighing 6,000kg to 9,000kg, in the streets of central London to help draw attention to the dangers of climate change. Meanwhile, in Singapore, two of his immersive works that use light can be enjoyed as part of the major exhibition, Minimalism: Space. Light. Object, taking place at the National Gallery Singapore and the ArtScience Museum.

“Olafur Eliasson combines the science of colour and perception, the processes of nature and cutting-edge technologies to create transformative works that invite a deeper engagement with our environment,” remarks Russell Storer, Deputy Director of Curatorial & Research at National Gallery Singapore, pointing out that Eliasson is a “crucial artist” in the exhibition. “He extends the experiments in light and space begun by artists in the 1960s into a contemporary context of audience participation and sensory experience.”

Having once remarked that art was not about just decorating the world but also about taking responsibility, Eliasson believes that art’s potential is created by the viewer’s own participation in, and experience with, the artwork.

“I’ve always insisted that the quality of the experience you have when getting involved with art somehow draws on a narrative that is outside the art world,” he says, explaining that he likes viewers to relate their experiences with his works to other experiences, prompting them to examine and question what they see and how they see it.

Eliasson aims to create artworks that prompt the viewers to question their relationship to the works and the importance of their presence in the space, ideally helping them realise how their presence can make a difference, often doing so with the use of fog, mirrors, light or water manipulating the space around the work, be it outdoors or indoors.

THE EXISTENTIALIST EXPERIENCE

The Icelandic-Danish artist started to attract international attention with the Green River project in 1998, when, unannounced, he poured a water-soluble dye in several rivers, turning them green. But it was his The Weather Project at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London in 2003, the same year he represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale, that secured his standing. The work, which attracted two million visitors, fundamentally altered the way visitors see the museum. In particular, visitors started to see the Turbine Hall as a public space, recalls Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions and Programmes

“I’ve always insisted that the quality of the experience you have when getting involved with art somehow draws on a narrative that is outside the art world”

– Olafur Eliasson

at Tate Modern, which will put on a large mid-career survey of the artist in July 2019.

Eliasson had created a vast optical illusion that basked the giant hall in a warm, misty orange, artificially recreating a glowing sun with the help of a wide semi-circular screen backlit by 200 yellow mono-frequency lamps; also, as visitors looked up, they could make out their reflections as tiny specks on a reflective ceiling. “It was very much about doing something that first appears two dimensional, the sun, but actually was very physical,” Eliasson says, recalling how visitors started to lay on the floor trying to find their own reflection in the great hall, collaborating with others to create words, even phrases, including “Bush go home” (reflecting the anti-Iraq-war sentiment at the time).

“I think what was interesting with the work was finding one’s own body and collaborating with others. That kind of work was most successful at sorting out (the question of), ‘Do I exist, do I matter?’” he adds.

As he flicks through the pages of Olafur Eliasson: Experience, recently published by Phaidon and the most comprehensive book on his portfolio to date, the artist points out that all his projects are connected by a high degree of synchronicity. Melting ice, for example, first appeared in his work in 1998, when he left small ice blocks outside a museum in Paris. In 2006, he took several blocks of ice from the largest glacier in Iceland and exhibited them in a refrigerated space in a Berlin gallery to explore the idea of time and wasted time, and encouraged the public to touch the blocks, taking away “time” from the 2,500-year-old ice as it melted at their touch.

His more recent Ice Watch series, where large blocks of Greenlandic ice are left to melt in public spaces, aims to raise awareness about sustainability, a recurring theme in his works. “I want to give language to climate change and its impact – a notion that is so abstract,” he explains. “When you hear the ice go ‘pop, pop’, it’s a very visceral experience.”