Olafur Eliasson’s survey “Your Curious Journey” declares the artist’s environmentalist priorities within the opening work: a sequence of before-and-after pictures of Icelandic glaciers titled “The Glacier Soften Collection 1999/2019.” Photographs taken in 1999 and 2019 are displayed side-by-side within the exhibition, organized by the Singapore Artwork Museum and touring round Southeast Asia and New Zealand by way of 2026. The paired photographs, organized in a grid, reveal substantial lack of glacial ice over time.
Olafur Eliasson: The Glacier Soften Collection 1999/2019, 2019.
Picture Joseph Nair. Picture courtesy the artist and Singapore Artwork Museum. © 2019 Olafur Eliasson.
Eliasson has dedicated his apply to elevating local weather consciousness because the Nineteen Nineties. Probably the most well-known instance is his 2014 venture Ice Watch, which noticed chunks of icebergs harvested from a fjord, then spectacularly put in in European capitals, the place locals watched them soften. Right here, as in The Glacier Soften Collection, viewers had been made to witness results of local weather change that may really feel distant or arduous to see.
However the place Ice Watch generated the type of participatory engagement for which Eliasson is thought, with guests touching the ice and transferring round and thru it, The Glacier Soften Collection reads like a geography textbook. The succession of 30 comparisons is relentlessly didactic, leaving little room for have an effect on or interpretation. And maybe that is a part of Eliasson’s level: there must be no bones about local weather change.
Nonetheless, it’s arduous to reconcile this work with the erratic delight of Ventilator (1997) hanging close by. An electrical fan strikes of its personal accord, making swooping arcs by way of the gallery. Ventilator speaks to the always shifting dynamics of intentions and penalties: Its motorized operate was initiated by human motion, however its subsequent motion is propelled by forces past the artist’s management. Monitoring the fan’s unpredictable trajectory generates an expertise that’s nearer to what it’s to reside with local weather change, reasonably than to take a look at it as a earlier than and after, a fait accompli.
View of “Olafur Eliasson: Your Curious Journey,” 2024, on the Singapore Artwork Museum.
Picture Joseph Nair. Picture courtesy the artist and Singapore Artwork Museum.
Such static qualities additionally characterize one of many present’s latest items, The Final Seven Days of Glacial Ice (2024). On this sculpture, the ice has no probability of melting, because it has been rendered in bronze. Primarily based on the dissolution of an ice block Eliasson recovered from the south of Iceland (he was raised in Denmark by Icelandic dad and mom), every of seven successively smaller bronze casts is paired with a glass orb representing the quantity of water misplaced. The bronze aligns the piece with classical sculpture, making the work a monument, the iceberg, one thing of the previous to ponder from a distance. The die has been solid; little stays for the viewer to do.
The Final Seven Days turns water into glass, one thing fastened and arduous. Magnificence (1993), in contrast, expands water’s perceptual resonance in ways in which invite engagement and marvel. Gently falling mist combines with projected mild and the viewer’s notion to create an ethereal rainbow.
Olafur Eliasson: The Final Seven Days of Glacial Ice, 2024.
Picture Joseph Nair. Picture courtesy the artist and Singapore Artwork Museum. ©2024 Olafur Eliasson.
Lasers and fog comprise Symbiotic Seeing (2020), on an higher flooring within the Singapore Artwork Museum cease, and collectively generate an ever-changing cloudscape, supposedly attuned to the transferring warmth of the viewer’s physique. I attempted and failed to seek out the interactive part of the swirling mist; there, within the darkened house of the set up, the glaciers are removed from view. The identical might be mentioned for Eliasson’s new work on the Museum of Up to date Artwork Los Angeles, the place a serious exhibition dedicated to the artist (as a part of PST ART: Artwork & Science Collide) focuses fully on the optical distortions of kaleidoscopic sculpture. Delight as they might, what I crave is an artwork that may join the pleasures of this world with its perils, with out diminishing both.
In his greatest work, Eliasson finds this candy spot. It seems in a glimpse into the artist’s studio, as a part of Motion Microscope (2011). The 16-minute video introduces components of dance into the labors of on a regular basis life, a refined interruption of routine that heightens consideration to happenstance. We see the work of design and fabrication, but in addition the marvel of a shared meal, produced by Eliasson’s famend studio kitchen and sourced partly from an on-site backyard. That second of connection between the small and the grand, the sensory and the social, the native meal and the worldwide circumstances impacting its components, felt just like the bridge I used to be lacking between so most of the different items.
View of “Olafur Eliasson: Your Curious Journey,” 2024, on the Singapore Artwork Museum.
Picture Joseph Nair. Picture courtesy the artist and Singapore Artwork Museum.
A few of the paradoxes that inhabit Eliasson’s current work discover clear type in Adrift Compass (2019), its title an obvious oxymoron. Compasses ought to orient us, giving us objective and path. This one, fabricated from driftwood, factors north, however within the darkness of the gallery, minimize off from the surface world, it does certainly depart us adrift. Figuring out the place to go is just not the identical as producing motion, simply as recognizing the consequences of local weather change is just not the identical as stopping it. Eliasson’s current and extra spectacular work stands out as the product of this frustration, of seeing so clearly the change that has come and but feeling so acutely our lack of ability to reply.