Olafur Eliasson
Seu planeta compartilhado, 2011

Installation view: Abundant Futures in Troubled Times. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2022

Photo: Fernando Sendra | TBA21

Remedios

Olafur Eliasson

Collection

Stainless steel, aluminum, color-effect filter glass, mirrors
195 x 289 x 149 cm

In Seu planeta compartilhado (Your shared planet), a metal frame supports an arrangement of four individually shaped and colored kaleidoscopes with triangular, hexagonal, rhombic, and square apertures. Positioned at eye level, the work invites viewers to move along the openings and gaze through the faceted lenses, colored in yellow, green, turquoise, and blue. The tapered ends of the four optical devices are oriented toward one vanishing point from where the image of a shared planet emerges in the shape of a polyhedral pattern. The work touches on the recurrent theme in Olafur Eliasson’s art: the interdependence of perception, movement, and space and the many ways they constitute one another. Well-versed in the history of the gaze and its complicity with structures of power, he creates viewing apparatuses that divert, complicate, and externalize the act of seeing, thereby detaching it from its primary role in registering reality. His instruments and viewing machines aim to recompose perception as the capacity of being-in-the-world with a heightened sense of emotion and embodied cognition, thereby rekindling an expanded sense of presence and attention. By mobilizing viewers and eliciting the experience of seeing differently, Eliasson hopes to reactivate a sense of enchantment with the planet and, with it, a collective political horizon.

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1967. Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark and Berlin, Germany.

ARTIST'S WEBSITE

here

FIND MORE

Olafur Eliasson, BAROQUE BAROQUE. Exhibition featuring works from Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and the Juan & Patricia Vergez collections at Winter Palace, Vienna 2015. Direct link here , exhibition catalog here. Article by Wallpaper* Magazine here

Eliasson, Olafur & Volz, Jochen. Your Body of Work. Curatorial Text, Critical Texts by Lisette Lagnado, Guilherme Wisnik and Interview with the artist, 2011. 17th International Contemporary Art Festival and Associação Cultural Videobrasil. Full material here

Luciana Chen, Myrna. Nacimiento Cuerpo, espacio y tiempo: (in) visibilidades en las obras de Kusama, Salat y Eliasson/ Body, space and time: (in) visibilities in the works of Kusama, Salat and Eliasson (ENG/ES). Essay, 2019. pp 147-151, here

Olafur Eliasson on light, art, and Little Sun, video, 2019

Light! On light in life and the life in light, Forlaget Tor.dk, 2015

Life In Space: Einar Thorsteinn – Fivefold Symmetry, video, Studio Olafur Eliasson, 2015