Experience the Icelandic-Danish artist’s three-decade-long practice in 17-work snapshot — his first-ever major show in Southeast Asia.

Artists who manage to stand out in our modern times are celebrated for a slightly different reason as compared to their predecessors. Not only has today’s access to information, research material, physical materials and creative tools increased exponentially. So have the immediacy and awareness of peer work, which makes determining what is good art or a good artist a lot more difficult than before.

That is also discounting the fact that just about everyone, trained artist or not, is able to make art and share that with the rest of the world.

So what does it take? What does art today need to have its flighty audience look for longer than a millisecond, or long enough to understand what it is trying to express? Perhaps Olafur Eliasson knows the answer(s), for his works ace in extracting universal yet fleeting, nuance-like feelings, and blowing them up in size and proportion to grip and enamour all with urgency.

Luckily, for Singapore residents, we are lucky to access a fraction of his celebrated repertoire for the next few months. Well-loved for his genre-crossing expression and making ephemeral feelings and thoughts tangible, the Berlin-based Icelandic-Danish artist puts up his travelling show Your curious journey at SAM at Tanjong Distripark from now till September, presenting a total of 17 key works (including never-before-seen works and Singapore-exclusive installations) before moving on to four other venues in the Asia-Pacific region.

Touching on major themes like embodiment, experience, perception, as well as climate action and more-than-human perspectives, Eliasson masterfully employs everyday resources like light, wind and water to illuminate and make palpable some deep-seated emotions towards the environment.

From the interactive Yellow corridor (1997), which explores audience co-creation through an uncanny somatic experience of the space where one’s visual spectrum of colours is desaturated and washed in shades of grey, to the haunting Beauty (1993), an iconic mist and light collaboration that challenges the act of perception and the experience of seeing, the spirit of play is always imminent.

Yet, works like The last seven days of glacial ice (2024), which visualises the melting of a fragment of ice from a nearby glacier at Diamond Beach in the south of Iceland, and The seismographic testimony of distance (Berlin–Singapore, no. 1 to no. 6) (2024), a series of unique seismographic sketches created by Eliasson’s drawing machines that trace the artworks’ journey from Berlin to Singapore by sea instead of air, dig deeper into the artist’s concern with the state of Mother Nature, and will leave you and your brows furrowed over pertinent questions that will take quite some brain power to ruminate over or reflect on.

But the work that best showcases Eliasson’s international acclaim is Symbiotic seeing (2010). Tucked away in a separate exhibition space on the third floor of the building space is a mirage-like space that seems to envelop its visitors with its own indoor sky and horizon when they enter. What gives the ceiling that sun-lit glow and rolling clouds are a combination of blue and yellow laser lights, that when cross-fired and coming into contact with periodically released fog, create ripples and currents of fog swirl that move as we do, occupying the liminal space between physical states. We thus experience the space not just as an audience but a member of its production team, as individuals and communally — a realisation that comes just as serenely as it stays, and then calmly drifts away. Eliasson is as much a fan of expression as he is of co-creation and interactive art, and this is one of the Singapore-exclusives that is not only beautiful to experience, but a showcase of the way the artist’s one-of-a-kind mind — this marvel is one you must not miss.

Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey runs from 10 May to 22 September 2024 at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Once you’re done with this story, click here to catch up with our May 2024 issue.