Opening at Istanbul Modern on 07 June 2024, 'Olafur Eliasson: Your unexpected encounter' offers an opportunity to explore Olafur's three decade long practice and the themes central to it. Olafur emphasises that his works are only complete when viewers engage with them and consider this active participation to be an essential component of his work. Through the audience’s dynamic process of discovery, the phenomena Olafur presents – whether in varied contexts or scales – frequently results in unique experiences.⁠

Image: Detail of 'Dusk to dawn, Bosporus, 2024; part of Olafur Eliasson: Your unexpected encounter (Senin beklenmedik karşılaşman) at Istanbul Modern (photo: Jens Ziehe⁠).

Viewed from the entrance, the tunnel appears to glow in a fluctuating array of bright tones that overlap and combine to form unexpected colours. The variations in hue are caused by dichroic, colour-effect glass, a material that reflects certain wavelengths of light while allowing others to pass through it unimpeded. The glass thus appears to be a different colour depending on the angle at which the light hits the glass and the position from which it is seen. Viewed directly, the glass appears pink, with a cyan reflection on the surface; seen from an angle, a range of other colours in the spectrum between the two emerges, including oranges and yellows. As viewers move through the tunnel, the colours change constantly, drawing them onwards. The structure simultaneously seems to expand and contract accordion-like towards either end. This sense of movement is enhanced by parallel curves outlined by the angled panels.⁠

Image: Tunnel for unfolding time, 2022; permanently installed in Fundación Hortensia Herrero, Valencia – 2023 (photo: Sharron Ping-Jen Lee / Studio Olafur Eliasson).

Your glacial expectations, a collaboration between landscape architect Günther Vogt and Olafur, refers in its design to the glaciers that formed the landscape around the Kvadrat headquarters, as can still be seen in the site’s topography and geology. The project does not end at the property boundaries, but incorporates the entire surrounding landscape. Building and parking lot have been integrated into the landscape. ⁠
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Set directly in the rambling meadows, Olafur’s five mirrors form a series ranging from a perfect circle to ever more elongated ellipses. The mirrors reflect the ever-changing sky above and the contemplator’s own gaze, as if in the surfaces of glacial pools in Iceland. The sky opens up in the soil beneath the viewer. ⁠
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This blurring of the boundaries between above and below, inside and out, finds resonance in the landscape’s melding of wilderness and garden. The dense and clearly delineated groups of trees, planted by Vogt on slight elevations, may appear to be cultivated gardens from a distance. Up close, they are in fact slices of untended wilderness. Although one might expect to be allowed to enter the wild groves, fences deny access – they are Gardens of Eden that cannot be entered. ⁠
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The sheep that graze the meadows are not native to the site. Part of Olafur’s vision, they were specially brought in from Iceland for Your glacial expectations.⁠
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⁠Image: Your glacial expectations, 2012, Kvadrat, Ebeltoft, Denmark, 2012⁠⁠ Photo: Annabel Elston⁠

Reminiscent of the crystalline basalt columns commonly found in Iceland, the geometric facades of Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre were based on a modular, space-filling structure called the quasi brick. Originally developed by geometer and mathematician Einar Thorsteinn in the 1980s, following fifteen years of research into the topic, the quasi brick is a twelve-sided polyhedron consisting of rhomboidal and hexagonal faces. ⁠ ⁠ 

In 2002, Olafur and Einar began investigating the potential for using the quasi brick in architecture. When the modules are stacked, they leave no gaps between them, so they can be used to build walls and structural elements. The combination of regularity and irregularity in the modules lends the facades a chaotic, unpredictable quality that could not be achieved through stacking cubes. As a result, the facades for Harpa are both aesthetically and functionally integral to the building. ⁠ 

Only the main south facades of Harpa employ the three-dimensional quasi bricks; the irregular geometric patterns of the west, north, and east facades were derived from a two-dimensional sectional cut through the three-dimensional bricks. ⁠ The quasi brick modules incorporate panes of colour-effect filter glass, which appear to be different colours according to how the light hits them; the building shimmers, reacting to the weather, time of year or day, and the position and movements of viewers.⁠ 

Olafur and his studio designed the facades of Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre in collaboration with Henning Larsen Architects.⁠ ⁠ 

Image: Façade for Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre, Reykjavik, 2013, Photo: Nic Lehoux⁠ 

In 2008, Olafur harvested about fifty large tree trunks from the northern coast of Iceland. The wood, not native to that country, where less than one percent of the land is covered in forest, belonged to a mass of timber that washes up on Iceland’s shores from Siberia, carried by drifting polar ice and bleached by the sun and saltwater during its long transit.⁠
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After shipping the trunks to Berlin, Olafur then curated an urban intervention with the driftwood, inserting the massive logs into the cityscape overnight, leaving them in unexpected locations, on main plazas and small side streets alike. The trunks were placed in roundabouts, parking areas, and other in-between spaces as if they had simply drifted into the city and become entangled in its grid. This intervention, titled 'Berliner Treibholz' (Berlin driftwood; 2009), used the timber to generate small frictional dialogues, offering momentary thresholds of subtle resistance to our often pragmatic and automated relations with our surroundings.⁠
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The driftwood represents a story of migration and a narrative of natural forces. These nomads hover on the border between natural and artificial, between the normal and the unexpected, just as they float on the border of the sea and the Icelandic shore.⁠
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Images: 'Berliner Treibholz', 2009. Berlin, 2010. 

'Your double-lighthouse projection' deals with the concept of ‘completing’ a work in the eye of the beholder. ⁠
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‘Faced with two circular rooms of different sizes, viewers are initially invited to enter the larger space incorporating hundreds of red, blue and green fluorescent tubes encased behind a seamless translucent wall. The colour of the illuminated enclosure, flooding the perceptual field, gradually changes through a random spectrum, from pink to blue to orange and so on. At each point, the retinal after-image mixes the colours perceived before the eye, until it becomes impossible to differentiate between the two. The adjacent room, lit simply with white light, provides viewers with the opportunity to refresh their visual faculties. Always in a state of flux, the work constantly communicates new experience and meaning.’⁠ - Susan May, Tate Modern curator, ‘Meteorologica’, from 'Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project‘, 2003. 
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Image: 'Your double-lighthouse projection,' 2002⁠. Tate Modern, London, 2004 – 2002, Tate Photography (Andrew Dunkley & Marcus Leith).

Starting in 2018 Olafur began producing artworks inspired by the phenomenon of the lens flare – the rings and circles of light that appear in a lens when it is pointed towards the sun or another bright light source. Resulting from the physics of the lens, flares are generally considered errors to be avoided in photography and film. Olafur, however, transforms these undesired flares into a central element to be explored in all its aesthetic possibilities. Originating in his long interest in light and refraction, this body of works includes projections as well as dynamic glass wall compositions like this one. Colourful panes of silvered, handblown glass are arranged according to the geometrical arrangements that result from the flare. The ripples, bubbles, and small irregularities in the hand-blown panes of glass reflect the craftsmanship that has gone into the artwork’s production and lend the shapes a fluid organic quality. The vibrant composition of overlapping circles and ellipses stretches out in front of a grey background that presents a spiralling vortex flattened into two dimensions.⁠
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Image: 'The spiralling presence of the not-too-distant future', 2023 (photo: Jens Ziehe).
        

‘The Flesh of the Earth,’ a multidisciplinary exhibition curated by Nigerian-American writer and critic Enuma Okoro opened recently at Hauser and Wirth, New York. ⁠
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The exhibition, in the words of Okoro, ‘encourages us all to consider ways of decentering ourselves from the prevalent anthropocentric narrative, to reimagine a more intimate relationship with the earth and to renew our connection with the life-force energy that surges through all of creation, both human and more-than-human. Our human bodies—one of a diversity of created bodies of the natural world—are the primary language with which we dialogue with the earth. By acknowledging that these varied bodies are always in relationship we reawaken our awareness of the quality of those relationships, considering where we may falter or harm, and also deepen our appreciation and recognition of our interdependence with the more-than-human world.’ ⁠
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Olafur's work ‘Now, here, nowhere’ forms part of the exhibition.⁠
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Image: 'Now, here, nowhere' 2023, Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Los Angeles

‘The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise. This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly. Rules may fail to explain what we are doing. We are not self-important, we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves, which is part of saying that we are open to self-construction. We may not have rules, and when we do have rules, there are no rules that are to us sacred. We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. While playful we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in, any particular "world". We are there creatively. We are not passive. Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight.’ - Maria Lugones, 'Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception', 1987. ⁠
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Images: ‘Din blinde passager’, 2010. Tate Modern, London, 2019. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.⁠

At the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, we run a series of experiments examining the idea of trust… Our assumption was that trust is something that can easily be eroded but is difficult to build up. We, therefore, conducted an experiment where people alternated between playing with computer agents, or bots, that were either quite willing to share or really unwilling to share, and with other people who had had similar experiences. This allowed us to create particular environments of high and low trust. Our assumption was that if one starts out in a scenario of high trust, one may be able to remain in that state. However, if one were so unlucky as to begin in an experiment under conditions of low trust, it would be very difficult to build it subsequently. In fact, this was not at all what we found. People appeared to be enormously responsive to the environment they were in, here and now. When they were playing with ‘trusting bots’, they would also display a high degree of trust. And if the bots showed a low degree of trust, then the participants also displayed a low degree of trust. Furthermore, when they interacted with other people, participants were actually rather unaffected by what had gone on in the previous round. Thus, the picture that emerged was that people seem very sensitive to the specific environment and rules of interaction that were applicable at a given time. This is potentially a very positive story – if it holds – because it appears that trust may breed trust, just as distrust breeds distrust.’ - Olafur interviewing Andreas Roepstorff, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, for the catalogue of the exhibition ‘In Real life’, Tate Modern, 2019. ⁠
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Image: ‘In real life’, 2019. Tate Modern, London, 2019. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.

In 'Your trust', 2014, six panes of hand-blown, coloured glass have been arranged at eye-level inside an open metal box, one behind the other, to create an array of overlapping ellipses. Each pane has been tinted a single tone of green, blue, violet, red, orange, or yellow, and a different elliptical section, ranging from a thin oval to a full circle, has been cut out to create a dynamic progression of colour and geometry. The layering of the panes produces myriad tints that shift and emerge as the viewer moves about the work.⁠
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The elliptical cut-outs allow only highly restricted views of the sheets of glass within. Each pane is visible only through the filtering effect of the others, leaving the viewer uncertain about the actual colouration of the glass sheets (photo: Jens Ziehe).

'Olafur Eliasson: A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows' explores the ideas central to Olafur’s new public artwork, 'A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows', 2023. From the large light-and-water installation 'Your split second house',2010 to 'Firefly biosphere (falling magma star)', 2023, a geometric sculpture containing intricately refracted light, to new drawings powered by sunlight, wind, and other phenomena of nature, 'A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows' presents a selection of works that appeal to the senses and are supported by research into natural phenomena, geometry, physics, movement and patterns.⁠
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Images: 'Firefly biosphere (falling magma star), 2023;  currently showing as part of 'Olafur Eliasson: A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows' at Azabudai Hills Gallery, Tokyo; Opens to the public until 31 March 2024 (photo: Shimei Nakatogawa).

Permanently installed in the atrium of an office building in Munich, two spiral staircases interlock with each other, creating a continuous loop in the form of a double helix. To plan the work, a double helix was projected onto the surface of a sphere. The heights of the steps vary slightly to compensate for the curvature of the staircases, growing shallower at the poles. Precise engineering was necessary to enable the structure to balance on one point. The continuous loop of 'Umschreibung' contrasts starkly with the office courtyard in Munich, where it is installed. 'Umschreibung' – which can be translated as ‘circumscription’ or ‘periphrasis’ – proposes a movement without a destination, a space defined by motion rather than walls.⁠
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Images: 'Umschreibung', 2004; permanently installed at KPMG Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft, Munich (photo: Thilo Frank).⁠

A four-metre-tall column of disparate geometric forms, 'Power tower' was constructed as a stainless-steel framework, incorporating triangular panels of plywood and handblown, coloured glass in an intuitive, yet symmetric, manner. Light bulbs mounted at intervals along the length of the column illuminate it from within, casting variegated, angular shadows around the surrounding space. The geometric forms that make up the work were arrived at intuitively through playing with a children’s toy, known as Zometools, a construction set that consists of struts and nodes that allow great flexibility in creating geometric forms.⁠

While the panels of plywood indicate the faces of the polyhedrons, the panes of coloured glass are embedded within the structure, sketching out a multicoloured core. The tones progress from purple at the floor through the major colours of the visible spectrum – red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue at the apex.⁠
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Image: 'Power tower', 2005/2023; previously shown in 'The curious desert', in National Museum of Qatar, Doha, Qatar, 2023 (photo: Anders Sune Berg).⁠