Olafur Eliasson
Photo: Runa Maya Mørk Huber / Studio Olafur Eliasson; © Olafur Eliasson
A major exhibition of more than 40 works by Olafur Eliasson opening this week at Tate Modern reflects the Danish-Icelandic artists ongoing quest to raise awareness of the climate emergency (Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life, 11 July-5 January 2020).
A new sculpture formed by casting a block of glacial ice in bronze, The presence of absence pavilion (2019), references Eliassons project Ice Watch, which brought ice blocks from Greenland to Tate Modern last year. “One of the ice blocks was sent to [the studio in] Berlin. We took a negative cast so that the void is in the black box, which I call the presence of absence,” the artist says. “You can see the space where the ice block was; you can stand inside and become the world.”
Eliasson's Ice Watch project brought 24 blocks of glacial ice from Greenland to Tate Modern last year
Photo: Charlie Forgham Bailey; © 2018 Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing
Artists such as Eliasson have long drawn attention to climate change through their work, yet the hefty carbon footprint of the international art world has gone largely unchecked. “The cultural sector is trying to find its feet and come up with strategies to navigate this,” Eliasson says. “We need to differentiate between the art world and the art market in terms of sustainability. With the market, you should ask Frieze art fair and not Tate Modern how they want to tackle this question.”
Eliasson highlighted a climate change debate he participated in last night at Tate Modern with representatives from the activist group Extinction Rebellion. The talk brought together the designer and activist Clare Farrell, the sustainability adviser Malini Mehra, the environmental campaigner and former Irish president, Mary Robinson, and the filmmaker Bidisha. “Cultural platforms can do things,” the artist says.
The exhibitions co-curator Mark Godfrey says the Tate chose works belonging mainly to European collections to reduce the projects own carbon footprint. For instance, among several kaleidoscopic sculptures made by Eliasson, the curators have borrowed Your Spiral View (2002) from the Boros Collection in Berlin. “We think all of the works came to Tate by truck and ferry, and not as air freight,” Godfrey says. “There may be components in things such as a valve for one of the pumps in the [new outdoor installation] Waterfall that came by air freight.”
Olafur Eliasson's new installation outside Tate Modern, Waterfall (20Read More – Source
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