Pluriverse, 2021, unfurls before the viewer as an evocative lightshow of shapes, colours, and shadows, created through the reflection and refraction of light. The ever-changing sequence develops and vanishes upon a large wall-size screen in a slow continuum that is at once two-dimensional and spatial. The viewer, despite knowing that the shapes are only light projections, sees space and three-dimensional forms where there are none.

Viewers who walk behind the screen can glimpse the apparatuses responsible for producing the projection: an array of three glass rings that hang from above and rotate within the beams of the spotlights, and a free-standing box that houses a custom-made kaleidoscopic device. The three rings of glass, two of which contain glass elements at their core, recur to a series of artworks Eliasson has produced since the early 2000s, in which a spotlight projected onto a rotating glass ring casts an arc of reflected light that slowly scans the surroundings. The custom-made box contains two horizontal, rotating discs. The lower, larger disc supports a collection of disparate glass lenses and objects, while the second holds a circular tray containing clippings from plants suspended in oil. A spotlight inside the box shines up through the rotating discs onto a circular mirror, mounted at an angle at the top of the contraption, where it is redirected out onto the screen. 

As each motor revolves at its own pace, the relationship between the various elements constantly changes, so that the light sequence always appears new. Chance alignments produce an ever-changing symphony of shadows and reflections on the screen – a primordial phantasmagoria of evolving shapes, arboreal shadows, spectral arcs, and fields of yellow and purple that wax and wane and ooze across the surface of the screen. 

Most of the lenses and objects featured here come from the artist’s own collection or are recycled from previous artworks and experiments. Eliasson has long been fascinated with optical devices and collected all sorts of lenses over the years as part of his investigation into perception and the qualities of light. In his projection works, the lenses are divorced from their potential for use in observation and recording and are taken as material to create something of beauty, what the artist refers to as radically analogue films, dependent upon the physical encounter between viewer and artwork in the here and now.