"Olafur Eliason: The Mediated Motion"
2001-03-31 until 2001-05-13
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Bregenz, , AT

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 Zurich landscape architect GuntherVogt, fills all four floors of the building. The artist transforms Peter Zumthors 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.

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.

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