Over the years, Danish-Icelandic artist Eliasson has continually returned to Iceland to investigate its landscape with his camera. The ambitious, ongoing venture – almost cartographical in its scope – has resulted in approximately eighty photo series to date and a wealth of individual photographs of glaciers, waterfalls, rivers, volcanoes, and caves. Far from merely documenting the terrain, Eliasson’s vibrant images reflect on our relationship to nature, the physical space in which we exist, and the body’s felt motion through space – central concerns in his œuvre.

Alongside Eliasson’s photographs, Contact is content presents a selection of further works by the artist, granting the reader a glimpse into the process of inspiration leading from physical experience to abstraction. The sequence of images, curated by Eliasson himself, traces the intuitive connections between the landscape and the different modes of expression employed by the artist.

Contact is content was first shown in the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: Riverbed at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 20 August 2014 – 4 January 2015.



‘Contact is content consists of photographs I took in Iceland, placed in dialogue with other artworks, many of which have been inspired by my recurring travels to the country. I have intuited my way through them to conceive a visual narrative that takes you up close and far away, that asks you to turn around, to look at the landscape anew, to look at yourself. As the material came together, content arose through contact between landscapes and artworks, bodies and weather conditions, light and relative darkness.’

Olafur Eliasson