Olafur Eliasson - Minding the world

In 2005, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum presented a spectacular exhibition of the world-famous Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, his first major solo exhibition at a Danish art museum.

Olafur Eliasson had visited ARoS Aarhus Art Museum several times in previous years to create a unique presentation in the new architecture. The exhibition at ARoS was therefore not just a series of individual works that each stood out with aesthetic perfection; Olafur Eliasson - Minding the world was very much a total installation. With its convincing and well-thought-out structure, created with, among other things, several brand new works, the exhibition formed its own unique universe; a sequence of spaces where the viewer was constantly surprised and challenged.

In the museum's special exhibition gallery and foyer, Olafur Eliasson had built a sequence of spatial suites, each of which gave rise to unique visual and cognitive experiences. A corridor of yellow monofrequency light; a camera obscura that turned our sensory experience upside down; a beautifully decorated stone floor that doubled into a gigantic, stretched mirrored ceiling; a rainbow that emerged in the fine water dust; a dense cave-like space of three-dimensional bricks; a water column illuminated by strobe lights; a dizzying, patterned light work; a large, kaleidoscopic mirror cave and a gigantic, triangular space scanned by large, moving coloured fields - these are just examples of the diverse experiential spaces Olafur Eliasson created, which together formed a unique whole.

By combining space and technology, Olafur Eliasson makes phenomena and forces from nature visible in his art, building the difficult bridge between science and art. In his work, there is a transformation from scientific complexity to clarified, aesthetic simplicity.