ARoS Art Museum announces new long-term partnership with Olafur Eliasson

Today, ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark announces a new long-term partnership with Icelandic-Danish contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin). Five years in development, Olafur Eliasson × ARoS – Shared Futures brings together ARoS and Studio Olafur Eliasson to create new ways of experiencing, exploring and engaging with Eliasson’s art and the questions it raises.

Upcoming exhibition: Thin Ice

The collaboration will launch in autumn 2027, during which ARoS will stage a major solo exhibition of work by Eliasson, titled Thin Ice. This exhibition presents key works from recent decades alongside new projects reflecting Eliasson’s growing engagement with the climate, ecology, and humanity’s relationship with its surroundings. Visitors will step into a darkened exhibition environment where large-scale installations of light, sound, water, mist and reflections make their own bodies and movement part of the art.

The exhibition also features a brand new and site-specific artwork. Sharing its name with the show, Thin Ice is a large-scale installation staged across the ground floor of the museum. Recreating the sensation of walking across ice, this commission will encourage visitors to become attuned to their footsteps and the consequences of movement. Just as we might pause to ask whether the ice beneath us is safe to cross, Thin Ice invites one to look inwards and consider whether our collective and individual actions or metaphorical “footsteps” are sustainable.

Acquisition of Presence

As part of the partnership, ARoS will also acquire Eliasson’s monumental work Presence (2025), which will become a major new work in the museum’s collection. Visitors to ARoS will encounter an enormous glowing yellow sphere that appears to hover in space, its surface ripples and shifts as viewers move around it. The illusion is created through Eliasson’s interplay of mirrors, monofrequency light and moiré patterns, inspired by high-resolution images of the sun’s bubbling convection cells, captured in 2020 by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. The yellow light floods the room, limiting the viewer's perception of colour to shades of yellow, black and grey making it a defining new presence in the ARoS collection. Presence will also be on display in Eliasson’s upcoming exhibition Thin Ice.

Waterfall to be presented on ARoS Art Square in a site-specific version

A central ambition of Shared Futures is to extend the collaboration beyond the museum’s walls and into the public realm.

Eliasson’s iconic installation Waterfall (2004) will be installed in a new site-specific version on ARoS’s Art Square from October 9, 2027. The cascading waterfall evokes the sight, sounds, and rhythm of a natural waterfall, while the clearly exposed construction allows viewers to understand the mechanism behind the phenomenon. The work builds on Eliasson’s longstanding exploration of water, movement and the relationship between natural phenomena and constructed environments, also seen in his monumental The New York City Waterfalls (2008).

New research opportunities and a publicly accessible Olafur Eliasson library

Shared Futures will also create new opportunities for research, learning and public engagement. The partnership includes a dedicated postdoctoral research position in collaboration with Aarhus University, creating new opportunities for in-depth academic research into Eliasson’s artistic practice. A publicly accessible Olafur Eliasson library and study space at ARoS will offer visitors, students and researchers an opportunity to engage more closely with the artist’s work, thinking and creative processes.

Together with a programme of public engagement activities, these initiatives will extend the experience of Eliasson’s art beyond the exhibition galleries, creating opportunities for sustained exploration, dialogue and discovery.

Shared Futures builds on a longstanding and significant relationship between ARoS and Eliasson. It began in 2004 with Minding the World, Eliasson’s first exhibition at ARoS and his first solo exhibition in Denmark, which followed a defining period in his international career after representing Denmark at the Venice Biennale and presenting The Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2003. The partnership continued with the opening of Your rainbow panorama on ARoS’s rooftop in 2011, which has since become an internationally recognized symbol of Aarhus. Today, the museum holds nine of his works and one of Europe’s largest collection of his installations. Unusual in its breadth, this relationship has encompassed exhibitions, the collection, architecture and a permanent artwork that has become inseparable from the public identity of the museum.

Olafur Eliasson said:

“ARoS has supported my work in Denmark for many years, so it felt natural to make my online archive and library available there. For me, Shared Futures means that we share an interest in achieving something other than simply adding one and one together to get two – sometimes it can be eleven. The ambition is to show that museums can offer depth and focus for engaging with an artist’s practice in a more detailed, granular way. It is about exploring the diverse ways of looking at art and understanding how art acts within the larger world.”

Rebecca Matthews, Director of ARoS said:

“Olafur Eliasson is one of the most visionary artists of our time. He has an extraordinary ability to make us see familiar things differently. Through light, space, and our own movement, his work makes us more aware of how we experience the world and how we relate to one another. We have seen the power of this at ARoS, where Your rainbow panorama has become part of how people encounter both the museum and the city. With Shared Futures, we want to take this relationship even further. Not simply by presenting new works of art, but by creating opportunities for people to explore ideas, ask questions and engage with some of the challenges we face together. That is the ambition behind Shared Futures: to make art an active part of how we understand the world we live in and the future we want to create together.”

Karin Salling, Vice Chair of the Købmand Herman Salling Foundation, said:

“For more than 20 years, the close collaboration between ARoS and Olafur Eliasson has brought extraordinary art experiences to Aarhus. With Shared Futures, they are building on this shared history while opening up new experiences and ways for people to engage with art. At the Salling Foundations, we are proud to support Shared Futures, an ambitious, world-class art project that will inspire, spark curiosity and invite even more people to connect with art.”

This project is realised with generous support from Salling Fondene.

For further information, please contact:
ARoS Press and Communications
presse@aros.dk
+45 61904942

Credit: Olafur Eliasson, Presence, 2025