These circular artworks were created by specially designed drawing and painting machines installed in the desert near Doha during The curious desert, 2023, Eliasson’s exhibition at the National Museum of Qatar. Eliasson has been creating drawing machines since 1998, a project he began in collaboration with his father, Elias Hjörleifsson, who was an artist as well as a sailor and cook. Eliasson’s drawing machines use elements of chance and natural phenomena to create markings in ink, paint, or coloured pencils on circular sheets of paper or canvas.

The drawing machines conceived for Qatar were installed within circular pavilions that were open at the top to the sun and weather – forces of nature that were enlisted to create indexical portraits of a specific place at a specific time.

These drawings were created in Qatar by a drawing machine erected in the pavilion Saltwater-drawing observatory, 2023. Two circular canvases – one white and the other black – turned slowly on motors as water, mixed respectively with black and white pigments, dripped down onto the spinning surfaces. The wind caused pendulums that extended above the pavilion walls to move the drawing utensils across the surface of the turning canvases, leaving undulating marks that directly reflect the weather conditions at that time.