As humans, we perceive our surrounding environment as composed of light, atmospheric sensations and various elements that come together to create an ecosystem and provide the input for our sensory organs. Particles and molecules combine through physical and chemical interactions and reactions to form matter in space, creating what we perceive as reality—a reality that may differ for other life forms or if observed with other technological tools. The rules of optics provide humans with a level of access to this physical reality based on the mechanics of light and its interaction with matter.
By manipulating light and optical effects, the acclaimed Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has further explored those interactions and dynamics, encouraging contemplation on the mechanisms of perception while challenging and expanding the viewer’s sensory experiences. In his three decades of research, Eliasson has embarked on an investigation into how we perceive and co-create our environments while prompting reflection on how our own sensory inputs are constructed and understood.
An immersive show of nearly forty works, “Your unexpected encounter,” at Istanbul Modern lets us experience those phenomena while exploring Eliasson’s practice and the themes central to it. Located on the banks of the Bosphorus, the museum’s minimal architecture designed by Renzo Piano echoes the show’s attempt to connect the earth, the sea and the sky with the space and our perception of it. Built in 2004, it is Turkey’s first museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art. This major Eliasson exhibition, curated by Öykü Özsoy Sağnak, Nilay Dursun and Ümit Mesci from the museum’s curatorial team, celebrates the twenty-year anniversary of the institution.
The exhibition marks the artist’s first comprehensive solo show in the country following his participation in the 1997 Istanbul Biennial. Returning to a city like Istanbul, with its unique stratified blend of cultures, was something special and important for the Icelandic-Danish artist, who opined in a statement that he would not be the artist he is today without that time spent in Istanbul almost three decades ago. “It is exciting to return to a city that has a lot of personal significance for me,” he said. “I am particularly intrigued by the city’s unique position on the Bosphorus, which is an important point of connection for maritime traffic. Navigation, orientation and the sea have been central themes in my art over the years, but they have a special meaning here.”
The entire show is conceived as a journey in the artist’s work and in our senses. From the very first room, visitors are invited to immerse themselves in a monochromatic orange-lit space that weirdly turns everything into monochrome when they enter it. In Room for One Colour (1997), one’s perception is subverted in an experience that’s like stepping into a movie from the 20s, where all the narration of feeling happened in gestures and lip movements—as if visitors were Dorothy in the beginning of “Wizard of Oz.” By manipulating the space with light, Eliasson creates a dimension where everything looks so weirdly opposite but, at the same, familiar.
In the next rooms, the artist captures the visitor’s attention again in an interplay between shining mirroring surfaces that further distorts the perception of space and time. Inspired by lens flares and circles shaped by refracted light from the sun or other sources as they hit a lens, works like Slow Daylight Seeing itself (2023) explore the glitches of those phenomena. Testing and challenging the light spectrum and the dimension of the color and reflections/projections, Eliasson explores the potential for lenses, mirrors and light sources to dynamically transform the spaces they inhabit.
In the same room, Sunset Kaleidoscope (2005) functions as an optical device that merges with the museum’s architecture and connects Istanbul Modern’s exhibition space with the Bosphorus and the city. Encased in a wooden box mounted on stands, a motor allows the kaleidoscope to rotate on its axis, providing an unprecedented psychedelic yet real experience of the city. Throughout the day, the landscape visible from the exhibition space is dynamically altered in a continuous evolution that blends the city with the sea, the ships passing by and their different cultural interactions.
Eliasson introduces visitors to a universe of color and light that lets the viewer interact with natural phenomena revealed in their mechanisms so that one can see them anew. More importantly, most of Eliasson’s works are intended to provide insights into the act of perceiving and the active role of the observer, emphasizing the act of observation and the connection between observer and observed. The visitor’s interaction with the works is a key element of their functions.
The show’s next step is an engaging experience with the light spectrum in Your pluralistic coming together (2023). Eight old spotlights placed on the floor of a darkened room illuminate the wall opposite with a bright white light when their beams converge. As the visitor moves through space, they create outlines of the body, colorful shadows or perhaps ghosts. Challenging our reactions to light and sight, the installation visualizes a multiplicity of sensations and feelings within us as we look at the world from a different lens. Manipulating light and optical effects and testing human perception, Eliasson invites viewers to actively participate in this work, too.
This installation in particular exemplifies how color and light are the key elements of the artist’s practice. While many artists have tried to translate those through a medium, Eliasson manipulates them directly as physical phenomena, never as pigments or materials. Here, light and color are the mediums, and artistic intervention unveils the mechanisms that allow the human eye to perceive them.
SEE ALSO: Tyler Mitchell Cordially Invites You to Experience His Vision of a Black Utopia
At the same time, despite the artist’s installations having a hyper-high-tech appearance, most of Eliasson’s works are based on basic optical studies and light phenomena—the fundamental behaviors and properties of light as it interacts with different materials and environments. Reflection, refraction, dispersion, diffraction, polarization, scattering, transmission and interference are the main optics phenomena and the main compositional guides in Eliasson’s work, forces that influence everything from everyday experiences to advanced technologies.
Notably, when conceived, Your Pluralistic Coming Together was the artist’s first installation to use LED projectors, which reduce energy consumption.
The climate emergency is the underlying theme in Eliasson’s show: blurring the boundaries between art, science and nature, he contemplates the mechanisms of perception and the environment, urging a confrontation with and a reflection on our relationship with nature and the impact of human activities on the planet.
As one gets further into the show, this nexus of art and environmental emergency becomes more and more evident: appearing in the darkness with flashing strobe lights from above is an impossible landscape made of water that alternatively appears as crystalized or fluid, depending on the interrelation between light and darkness. Examining concepts related to existence through the qualities of light and material, Model for a timeless garden (2011) is time-hypnotic and dystopic, prefiguring a chimeric garden, as a hologram could potentially substitute for nature. Set in the space, the installation traces ephemeral curves that momentarily exist but suddenly pass into another state of matter and existential meaning for us as our perception of them changes. In this way, Eliasson encourages reflection on the fluid state of matter, constantly transitioning between status within our notions of temporality and existence and intertwining physical sensations with philosophical contemplation.
By creating visually compelling and emotionally engaging installations that combine art and science, Eliasson has succeeded in reaching a broad audience and making the abstract and complex issue of climate change more tangible and immediate. Eliasson is, in fact, actively involved in environmental advocacy and actively collaborates with scientists, activists, and policymakers to address climate issues. At the same time, his studio in Berlin functions more of a multidisciplinary lab, gathering a diverse team of specialized technicians, archivists, architects, and art historians working in various disciplines. This perfectly reflects the multidimensional nature of the artist’s work ecosystem and the intellectual depth of this interdisciplinary approach, able to bridge the gap between art, science, and activism, fostering a holistic understanding of the climate crisis.
Another example of this is the minimalism of the silent and suspended critique of the room containing his series of delicate watercolors. In the Ocean Fade (2016), soft gradients inhabit the paper surface, emulating the effect of a seemingly infinite ocean where waves dissolve in the nebulous mist, becoming one with the surface and vision, a pyre atmosphere. Standing in front of Your Proof of Presence (2023), a sculpture that strikingly mimics the appearance of an iceberg coming out from the floor. Thflook was created based on data that Eliasson’s team recorded with a three-dimensional scan of icebergs pieced from Diamond Beach in Iceland, named after the ice blocks resembling diamond pieces that wash ashore and remain on the beach until they melt. Translating those data into the Carrara marble, the artist eternalized the form of a ghost that already disappeared, creating a timeless witness of the global warming emergency.
This call for awareness becomes even more direct with works like the thirty chromogenic prints, The Glacier series (1999), which captures the profound unrelenting transformation of glaciers over time. Starting this documentation of the ice masses of Iceland in 1999, with the continuation in The Glacier Melt series (1999/2019), visitors are eventually forced to contemplate the scenario as time passes, confronting the dramatic effects of global warming on that landscape in twenty years.
Closing the show is another subtle but deeply impactful installation, The Presence of Absence pavilion (2019), inspired by the block of glacial ice in the Nuup Kangerlua fjord off the coast of Greenland. Instead of creating a replica of the glacier, Eliasson has decided to materialize the void, the absence of something lost that even the most advanced technology won’t be able to recreate and compensate for. With it, Eliasson aims to cultivate empathy among viewers for the thousands of similar glaciers that vanish daily. These works are directly linked with the artist’s memorable performance Ice-Watch (2014), presented in different cities to force a “close encounter” with the climate drama by transporting large blocks of glacial ice from Greenland to urban public spaces.
Hanging in one of the last rooms, there’s also a constellation of shimmering glass spheres: Your solar nebula (2015) directly invites the viewer to become part of this macrocosm of entities and phenomena we depend on, despite most times they might be unexplainable with our current human knowledge. The irregular geometry of the clusters also invites us to embrace the inherent chaos that dominates the universe while allowing once again the visitors to mirror themselves and contemplate the possibilities of multiple realities beyond the one that our limited human sensory capabilities allow us to see.
Eliasson’s show is not about pointing fingers at anyone but is instead a move to raise awareness and inspire us to take action: the exhibition is like a training that helps people consciously focus and experience all the phenomena that surround us while encouraging a more mindful interaction with the natural forces upon which our existence depends. Ultimately, the exhibition urges us to recognize that we are shaped by what we perceive and experience through our senses in relation to everything outside of us, emphasizing the need to care more about our world.
“Olafur Eliasson: Your unexpected encounter“ runs at Istanbul Modern through February 9, 2025.