Life Beyond: An interview with Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson created an artificial mist-shrouded sun in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern for The Weather Project, installed a cascading waterfall in the gardens of Versailles and employed circles of melting icebergs in Ice Watch to focus attention on climate change. Together with his collaborators at Studio Olafur Eliasson, he has worked between museum and public spaces. His most recent project combines both.
Image credit: Imogen Taylor, Pervert, 2021. acrylic on hessian. 51 x 61 cm. Courtesy the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland.
Olafur, we last saw each other in Brisbane, where your monumental work Riverbed (2014) occupied one of QAGOMA’s ground floor galleries for our summer 2019 exhibition Water. Then Covid-19 hit in early 2020. And now, as people in Europe emerge and move about, you’ve launched Life at the Fondation Beyeler, opening the museum to the elements and introducing a landscape of vivid green lily ponds.
The first thing I said to the museum was, “I need to take off the façade of the building, in order to invite everything that is outside the museum in.” And I mean everything – the air, the particles in the air, the insects and spiders and the birds and the bats and the foxes and the cats and the dogs. To host in the museum everything that is outside. I had a working title, The Outside Inside, but then I thought Life was better.
Tell me about the genesis of the project?
I had duckweed growing in my studio and I filmed it in a time-lapse, where you can see 24 hours in a minute. And then I could see thousands of small insects on it. There were insects and snails and things moving around in the water at night. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, it’s not just my plant, my duckweed, there are hundreds of small things that are living there!” I just couldn’t see them with my naked eye.
Conceptually for me [with Life], there were a few things. One was to make the water explicit. The green dye I used in the water, uranine, is ...Subscribe to read this article in full
