OLAFUR ELIASSON   The mediated motion      31 I 03 I 01 - 13 I 05 I 2001      
in collaboration with
Günther Vogt,
landscape architect
     
     
     
               
             
Exhibition View
Kunsthaus Bregenz
  Olafur Eliasson, born 1967 in Copenhagen, belongs to that younger generation of artists who in the nineties explored and expanded the boundaries between art, science and nature and the perception thereof. His show at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, done in collaboration with the Zürich landscape architect Günther Vogt, fills all four floors of the building. The artist transforms Peter Zumthor´s rigorously orthogonal architecture of concrete and glass on different levels by means of smell, fog, water, plants and soil in a parcours "of experience and of awareness of this experience" (Eliasson). His spatial installations incorporate the staircases and lead the visitor in a spiral passage on wooden footbridges through the house up to a hanging bridge on the top floor.

For years, Eliasson has transferred natural phenomena such as water, light, wind, temperature and movement into the art context using simple technical aids, always clearly pointing out the technology involved to the viewer. He showed an artificial rainbow in a Cologne gallery, had water run through the streets of Johannesburg, suspended a ventilator on a rope from the ceiling in Basel, and created an artificial expanse of ice in and outside of the exhibition space in Sao Paulo.
  
               
Exhibition View
Kunsthaus Bregenz 		     
             
               

 

Eliasson always includes the visitors to the exhibition, their senses, reflection, memory and their interpretations in his work. By means of their presence, the visitors change the installations, influence the sequence of occurrences and become aware of their perception and of themselves as perceiving. This relationship is evident also in the repeated "your" in the exhibition titles the artist chooses: "Your windless arrangement", "Your sun machine", "Your strange certainty still kept" or "Your compound view". The public receives an offer, a "gift", and carries a responsibility in accepting and using it. Eliasson describes this relationship as follows: "The audience is the piece, because everything else is in flux".

For the duration of the exhibition, the KUB-billboards along the Seestraße will be designed after photographs by Olafur Eliasson.

 
           
 
     
The Ice Pavillion, 1998, Reykjavik
© Courtesy neugeriemerschneider,
Berlin  und Tanya Bonakdar, New York 		Erdwand 2000, Hamburger Bahnhof,
Berlin
© Courtesy
neugerriemerschneider,
Berlin 		Yet untitled, 2000, Wanås, Schweden 
Photo: Anders Norrsell
Your natural denudation inverted, 
1999/2000, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh 		 
             
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