10AM–7PM
SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Singapore Citizens & PRs: $15 | Tourists and Foreign Residents: $20 | Concession tickets available
The upcoming travelling exhibition Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey is the first major solo exhibition in Southeast Asia dedicated to the work of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. The survey exhibition presents a broad range of artworks that employ diverse media to touch on the major themes of his three-decade-long practice – embodiment, experience, perception, as well as the urgency of climate action and more-than-human perspectives. In his art practice, Eliasson has been driven by the desire to make the ungraspable tangible. Artworks like Beauty (1993), Symbiotic seeing (2020), Ventilator (1997); and Adrift compass (2019) use ephemeral materials, such as light, wind, fog, and water, to conjure evanescent phenomena – shimmering rainbows, swirling mists, the split-second sculptural form of a spouting fountain – or make invisible elements of our surroundings like air or magnetic fields experienceable. Other works, like The cubic structural evolution project (2004), invite visitors to collaborate on creating shared experiences, building shared worlds.
SAM is the first stop for Your curious journey. Afterwards it travels to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand (6 Dec 2024–2 March 2025); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (31 May–31 Aug 2025); Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia (21 Nov 2025–5 April 2026); and Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, the Philippines (28 June–October 2026). The journeys that the artworks will take to each location over a period of three years is at the centre of one group of artworks on view in the exhibition: drawing devices installed in crates will create abstract drawings of the artworks’ long trip to their destination by truck, train, or boat. These visual traces will be on view at each leg of Your curious journey, bringing into the exhibition the global story behind the show’s development.
To compensate for the distances that the exhibition will travel, Eliasson and his team have sought ways to reduce its carbon footprint, including through changes in installation practice, maintenance, packaging, energy consumption, and, especially, transport. Artworks were selected that are lightweight, already located in the region, or whose materials can be sourced locally in order to keep transport distances to a minimum. Many of the artworks on view in the exhibition reflect Eliasson’s environmental concerns. The last seven days of glacial ice, 2024, for instance, presents the stages in a melting ice block that was found and scanned on a beach in Iceland, and The glacier melt series 1999/2019, a series of photographs taken by the artist in Iceland in 1999 and again from the same perspectives in 2019, shows the decimation of the country’s impressive glaciers over the past twenty years.
The works of artist Olafur Eliasson (IS/DK b. 1967) explore the relevance of art in the world at large. Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows – featuring installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and film – have appeared in major museums around the globe. In 2003, he represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale, and later that year he installed The weather project at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London. Eliasson’s projects in public space include The New York City Waterfalls, 2008; Fjordenhus, Vejle, 2018; and Ice Watch, 2014. In 2012, Eliasson founded the social business Little Sun, and in 2014, he and Sebastian Behmann founded Studio Other Spaces, an office for art and architecture. In 2019, Eliasson was named UNDP Goodwill Ambassador for climate action. In 2023, Eliasson received the Praemium Imperiale for outstanding contributions to the development, promotion, and progress of the arts from the Japanese Imperial Family.
Located in Berlin, Studio Olafur Eliasson comprises a large team of craftspeople, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialized technicians.
Find out more at olafureliasson.net
Olafur Eliasson, Symbiotic seeing, 2020, Installation view: Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, 2020, Photo: Franca Candrian;
Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles;
© 2020 Olafur Eliasson
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Special Thanks: Hong Leong Foundation
CURATOR TOUR
Join SAM curators Joella Kiu and Angelica Ong as they share insights on selected artworks in this tour of the exhibition, Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey.
• 11 May | Sat | 3-4pm
*General admission fees to the exhibition apply.
Watch this space for more exhibition-related programmes!
2001
Stainless steel, motor 200 × 95 × 95 cm
Double spiral takes the form of a single steel tube rolled into a double helix. The sculpture is motorised and, when activated, half of the spiral inches upwards while the other half slowly descends. Despite the impression of movement, the sculpture’s actual position does not shift. At eye level, the sculpture’s double-helix form is distinct and reminiscent of the organic structure of DNA. Yet, the sculpture casts a very different shadow on the ground—one of concentric circles that overlap one another like the moving cogs of a clock.
1993
Spotlight, water, nozzles, wood, hose, pump. Dimensions variable
In Beauty, a fine sheet of mist, reminiscent of a light drizzle, is illuminated by a singular spotlight in a darkened space. When viewed at just the right angle, a prismatic reflection of light reveals itself—a luminous rainbow that illustrates its namesake: beauty. Eliasson leaves Beauty’s mechanisms in full view—a simple combination of a spotlight, a punctured hose and us, the viewers—paring the rainbow down to its most essential constituents and demonstrating his continued interest in the formation of natural phenomena. Though the water is constantly flowing, the appearance of this apparition varies depending on our position relative to the artwork. As light is refracted and reflected on the water droplets differently, no two viewers see the same rainbow. The subject of Beauty is thus both the light and the viewer, which begs the question: Does the rainbow exist independently, or does it exist because we perceive it? This reflexivity that Beauty facilitates—combined with the exposed apparatus of the work—heightens our awareness of the very act of perception and our experience of seeing.
Collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
2009
Water, stainless steel, foam plastic, plastic, pump, nozzles, strobe light. Dimensions variable
Object defined by activity (then) consists of a water feature housed in a pitch-dark room. Its exuberant bursts of water are lit solely by a strobe light, which flickers ceaselessly at an aggressive tempo. Illuminated each time for a mere fraction of a second, we are barely able to register each fugitive image of the water’s mesmerising, organic and ever-changing form. While the consistent, uninterrupted sound of running water grounds us in real time, the work’s speed, high-key lighting and relentless, stroboscopic siege of spectacular imagery fragments and freezes this ongoing process into a multitude of micro-fissures in time. At once a dynamic physical installation and a series of still, fleeting frames, Object defined by activity (then) is perceived as simultaneously kinetic and static.
2001
Stainless steel, motor 200 × 95 × 95 cm
Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is internationally renowned for installations that challenge the way we perceive and co-create our environments. Approaching issues such as our changing understanding of climate, time and space, this exhibition showcases a range of artworks that immerses audiences within a shared experience. This catalogue features full-colour documentation of the artworks, complemented by a curatorial essay and newly commissioned texts; a conversation with the artist as well as itinerant marginalia that illustrates the entanglements between his practice and artistic approaches.
Available for purchase from the Epigram Coffee Bookshop at SAM, Level 1
Retail price: 40 SGD (inclusive of GST)
Details: Softcover, 152pp
ISBN number: 978-981-18-8614-0
1994
Reindeer moss, wood, wire. Dimensions variable
Located squarely within Eliasson’s relationship with Iceland is Moss wall. An organic, vertical carpet, this work comprises reindeer cup lichen (Cladonia rangiferina), also known colloquially as “reindeer moss,” which is a symbiont of at least one fungus and one alga and covers immense areas in northern tundra and taiga ecosystems. Here, the lichen is woven into a wire mesh to blanket an entire gallery wall. Disrupting an otherwise homogenous museum space, it collapses the boundaries between interior and exterior, bringing one of nature’s great wonders directly to the audience as they come face-toface with a living and breathing wall.
Collection of Tate