Who is Olafur Eliasson and why does he want you to watch ice melt? Kim Knight speaks to the internationally acclaimed artist (and former breakdance champion) about his blockbuster Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki exhibition, the weight of the haka - and how many different ways there
Olafur Eliasson at Auckland Art Gallery: Melting ice, falling stars - and half a tonne of reindeer moss
Yellow Corridor is one of the first works visitors encounter at Olafur Eliasson: Your Curious Journey, on show at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki until March 23, 2025. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
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Olafur Eliasson: Your Curious Journey is this summer’s headline act at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. It brings together 18 works from the past three decades, created by an artist who was born in Iceland, raised in Denmark and is now internationally renowned for monumental installations made from light, water, air and colour.
Enter the Auckland exhibition via an enormous corridor lit entirely in mono-frequency yellow. Encounter the Waikato River frozen-melting-frozen in one-cubic metre blocks of ice. Walk through a rainbow suspended in a saturating wet mist. Contemplate a wall made entirely of reindeer moss - half a tonne of it was been grown and imported especially for the show.
You could look at the art. But, cautions the artist: “If you just stand still, the two-dimensionality prevails.”
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Who is Olafur Eliasson and why does he want you to watch ice melt? Natasha Conland, Auckland Art Gallery’s senior curator of global contemporary art, offers some context:
“This is an artist who has wowed and changed audiences for 30 years . . . Hopefully it will be clear to New Zealanders by the time they finish visiting the show what a powerful impact his work has on you. But, as a curator, I suppose the first thing that needs to be said is that Olafur Eliasson is one of the most prominent names in contemporary art, globally. At the turn of the century he was considered one of THE most influential names in the art world - and since then, he has gone on to graft extraordinary new entrepreneurial and ambassadorial profiles.”
Eliasson is the co-founder of Little Sun, a clean energy company that has provided power and light to more than 3.2m people in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019, he was appointed to a goodwill ambassador’s role by the United Nations Development Programme “to advocate for urgent action on climate change and sustainable development goals”.
Very recent projects include the simultaneous take over of digital screens in New York’s Times Square, London’s Piccadilly Circus, Seoul’s K-Pop Square and Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. He has dyed seven rivers in seven countries bright green. His studio recently completed a subterranean “Breathing Earth Sphere” with no walls, ceiling or floor, on an island in Korea. In 2003, when he installed The Weather Project at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the mirrored ceiling, artificial mist and backlit semi circle attracted more than two million visits and was described as “a milestone in contemporary art”.
“It’s you and the work,” says Conland. “And whomever you are, you are making the work and you’re making it afresh.”
Eliasson uses art, science, technology and architecture to open people’s consciousness in a way that, she says, statistics about climate change might not.
“Without sounding too cheesy, I would say be prepared to be moved. And he is super interested in that idea of literal movement!”
A curious aspect of Eliasson’s own journey? In his teens, he was a Scandanavian breakdance champion.
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He tells the New Zealand Herald: “Getting pimples and hitting puberty, I started realising that break-dance was the epiphany that was going to lift me out of the misery of living on an agricultural farm in Denmark . . . moving around between the cows as a robot, moon-walking . . . no, I’m not kidding.”
Life lessons from breakdancing?
“As so many street performers had found out before me, if you manage to gather a crowd, a ring of people around you and you suddenly look to the left - everybody looks to the left. I could speed up other people by walking slow. I could curve buildings. I could rubber-fy and bend the street itself. The beauty of this - the serendipity of electric boogie breakdance - is largely about making physical forces explicit.”
Auckland Art Gallery has twice previously shown work by Eliasson (most memorably, the “build your own” experience that comprised thousands of white Lego pieces on a 12m-long table) but Your Curious Journey is the blockbuster; the largest exhibition of an international artist at the gallery in the past 20 years.
The show has travelled from Singapore, but includes two pieces specially made for this New Zealand iteration.
Under the weather, hanging in the atrium and visible from the Kitchener St frontage, is a large elliptical screen with a moire pattern that changes as the viewer moves around it. Still river (only shown twice previously) required the collection and storage of 3000 litres of water from the Waikato River. Over the course of the exhibition, it will be frozen and displayed as large chunks of ice in varying stages of melt - Auckland’s drinking water as you’ve never seen it before.
On a Thursday afternoon, just before the gallery closed, a young woman crouched by those blocks of ice, one diminished to a dirty grey, another with an internal trickle that had become a kind of pulse. In the next room, a child pirouetted in front of a screen and laughed when multi-coloured multiples of herself did the same.
When you engage - lean forward, walk, hike, touch - you give space to things, explains Eliasson.
It is 6am in Auckland and 6pm in Berlin. He is slightly late to the phone call (“I was trying to find my own password to my own account”) but it is the only pause in a mind-bending hour that traverses everything from the angles of a rainbow to the weight of the haka.
Recently, his team showed him a social media clip of Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke who, in November, led a haka that interrupted Parliament’s first vote on the Treaty Principles Bill.
“Here you have Instagram, the silliest of all media, so full of s*** that you cannot even carry it in your pocket anymore, and then you have the expression of that woman?
“Hana, she made a political speech, a very serious piece of parliamentary poetry, you might say . . . we wish that other speeches would be as consequential, and as deep and as insightful. She also made a cultural statement of artistic dimensions performed with such presence and quality . . . I know what she is saying, even though I don’t understand it - because it is unfair.
“This is such a tourist statement,” says Eliasson. “But I give my naivety blessings when I say the most physical thing to me in the world is the haka. I can feel the planet underneath the feet of myself when I watch the haka.
“Because I was a dancer, maybe. But, also, because that is what it is about - the ancestral energy right underneath me.”
He’s speaking to the Herald from his studio situated “maybe two kilometres” into the former East Germany. A former bread factory and chocolate factory, it was, at the time the Berlin wall came down, a rubber factory making car tyres and bicycle patches.
Today: “I don’t say ‘factory’ because I don’t know whether we are in the occupation of producing, in the sense of objects and societal norms. But we are absolutely a hopeful co-producer of the future that remains to be seen.”
And so is his audience. Because you don’t just look at an Eliasson artwork, you help make it.
“If you stand in the street and look up and see a rainbow, the person around the corner in the other street also sees a rainbow, but it is not the same because the geometry of the triangulation, you know, it is 47 degrees I think, between the drop, the sunlight and the eye. That angle, of course, changes depending on where you stand . . .
“This constant thing with nature is essentially a question of accountability to our body . . . I think the question is not whether we see something different. The question is the degree to which we are numb and we have given up on actually challenging the way we see things.”
Imagine you are in the Auckland Art Gallery room that houses the work called Beauty; a continuous spray of mist that soaks the carpet and catches rainbows.
“There is Beauty as I see it, and what you see will definitely, by definition, be quite different. It’s still the spectral phenomena of water and light and eye. But it is, by virtue, not just different - we interpret and experience things differently.”
It depends on where you are coming from. Where you are going. Maybe you hate the colour red and maybe the person next to you doesn’t. These discrepancies, says Eliasson, “might fertilise a discourse, a potential friendship, even a marriage . . . It is not just about your individual experience. It’s about having that with your friends, your peers, your families, your not-yet-known friends.
“The person next to you doing the same, evidently has a different trajectory. A different culture, heritage, has maybe indigenous roots which will fertilise an amazing imaginative potential that is of value to that person.”
Eliasson likes to say that, in an art museum, people can produce their own reality and, in a shopping mall, they consume their own identity.
“I would lean into the fact that people under-estimate the pleasures of being a producer, versus a consumer.”
Olafur Eliasson: Your Curious Journey shows at Auckland Art Gallery Toi ō Tamaki until March 23, 2025.
