Visual Arts

The artist Olafur Eliasson has caused quite a stir internationally with his increasingly complex and striking constructions. At the “Institut für Raumexperimente”, he is now also putting a model for art education to the test.
Just imagine sinking gently and entirely into a cosmos of colour. Wandering through red, green and blue and seeing how the colours blend to form orange and violet. This was the amazing experience Olafur Eliasson offered visitors to his exhibition Innen Stadt Außen (i.e. Inner City Out) at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin in 2010. One could lose oneself – or indeed panic – in these rooms full of illuminated nothingness.

Suddenly, all sense of orientation ceased to function. Children ran excitedly back and forth. Although nothing more complicated than coloured lamps and fog machines was used to create Your Blind Movement, it took Eliasson a great deal of experimentation before he came up with just the right consistency. With 22 installations and objects in all, he transformed the museum into an adventure course. One of the most complicated works was a scaffolding structure comprising mirror foil that created infinite reflected images of the glass ceiling of the Martin Gropius Bau. Visitors were immersed in an oversized kaleidoscope and in the illusion of a crystal palace.

With his actions and interventions, Olafur Eliasson has brought the artistic sphere into contact with the urban environment and made his mark – with bicycles featuring mirrored wheels and with driftwood from Siberia that washed up on the shores of Iceland. Since the mid-1990s, Berlin has been the chosen home of Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist who was born in 1967.

Even the title of the exhibition Innen Stadt Außen signalled a desire not to be confined by the walls of the museum and the conventions that prevail between them.

These three words – inner city out – describe the field of tension within which Eliasson moves. “In my understanding, an artwork is fundamentally tied to its surroundings, to the present, to society and to cultural and geographic determinants”, he posits on his extensive website.

Subtle experimental set-ups and gigantic constructions

Artificially generated natural phenomena such as wind, water, light and fog, and constantly reflecting materials and coloured glass are the ingredients for his ever more complex and at times spectacular installations. Audiences love them. Whether they notice or not and whether they want to be or not, they are participants in the installations. At the same time, however, they can be sure that they will be neither shocked nor lectured.

Eliasson started out with simple utensils and subtle experimental set-ups. In 1997 he used a long cable to hang a fan from the ceiling which swung to and fro above the heads of visitors to the exhibition. Because it was impossible to calculate which path the fan would take, visitors had to get out of the way and keep moving.

With increasingly complicated apparatus, gigantic geometric constructions and such sensational large-scale projects as the four waterfalls he created on the East River in New York (2008), Eliasson has become an art world entertainer who is in international demand.



He has leading curators and theoreticians on his side and works together with scientists and engineers. Particularly impressive features of his site-specific installations are his imaginative power, reflection on the environment, critical potential and technical realization. The Weather Project (2003) in the huge Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern is one such project: sun-hungry Londoners not only lay on the concrete floor, mesmerized and relaxed by Eliasson’s artificial, mist-shrouded sun – they could also watch themselves doing so in the reflective ceiling. The exhibition is said to have attracted two million visitors.

The experiment as artistic method and research model in education

These days, Eliasson receives a broad range of enquiries for commissions – everything from a postage stamp to a concert hall – spanning art, architecture and design. A panoramic viewing platform for the Aros Art Museum in Aarhus in Denmark and an exhibition in São Paulo are just two of a whole host of projects taking place simultaneously.

To create the equipment he needs, Eliasson has employed a studio team in Berlin ever since 1995. Two years ago, the studio – now both a laboratory and a company – moved into a specially converted former brewery building in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district. Some 40 artists, architects, technicians, craftspeople, scientists and art historians work here, researching, preparing, designing, realizing, teaching and analysing. The Model Room is the intellectual centre, a kitchen the communicative hub.

On the top floor is to be found the “Institut für Raumexperimente”, the innovative specialized programme that Eliasson established in 2009 in cooperation with the Berlin University of the Arts, at which he holds a professorship. This is a five-year experiment by means of which he expands his ideas and approach to work into the area of art education, giving 25 students of every conceivable nationality and specialist subject the chance to familiarize themselves with various aspects of spatial experiences and designs.

Through guest lectures and workshops they are able to take advantage of Eliasson’s network and know-how and use them to realize their own concepts or for the purposes of critical positioning. Walks through Berlin, during which the students explore the urban environment, and other excursions challenge them to confront modern urbanity and their own perception. Two co-directors, the cultural studies expert Christina Werner and the architect Eric Ellingsen, are responsible for implementing Eliasson’s vision of breaking down the hierarchies between teachers and students: “Experimentation as a method not only informs my school, but also forms the core of my artworks and my Berlin-based studio.”