Olafur Eliasson
Denmark’s representative at the Venice Biennale 2003
15/06/2003 - 02/11/2003
The Danish Contemporary Art Foundation
Danish Pavilion 2003
50th Biennale di Venezia
For images and further information please view www.olafureliasson.net/press
Olafur Eliasson: The Blind Pavilion
The Danish Contemporary Art Foundation has chosen the artist Olafur Eliasson (born 1967) to represent Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale. Olafur Eliassons work holds a unique position in contemporary art. His work does not immediately lend itself to being understood on the basis of one single perspective but takes its mark, rather, in certain universal processes common to all mankind. Olafur Eliassons installations of light, air, ice and water, reflections and vegetation, his photographs of the Icelandic landscape and his assiduous scientific investigations of the relation between culture and nature all of these experiments confront our own gaze and existence in the world.
In Eliassons exhibition The Blind Pavilion for the Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennale, virtually all the strategies that the artist has employed up until now are activated: mirror reflections, glass kaleidoscopes, stretches of stairway, architectural interventions and camera obscuras. The exhibition will shape itself as a total installation which, on several levels, will cancel out the dividing lines between work and viewer, between outside and inside, between art and science. This will be accomplished, specifically speaking, through the construction of several interposed planes and stairways, through the positioning of works outside the pavilion on the shifted roof surface and with works displayed indoors. They will simultaneously trigger our memory about the world outside and very concretely conduct the world inside via scopic machines.
As a crucial link in Eliassons procession of visions of a total experience, a book is being published. Rather than merely serving as a representative reading of the exhibition, the book possesses more the character of a parallel counterpart to the exhibition. In close collaboration with the Danish author Svend Aage Madsen, a number of Danish and foreign authors, poets and theoreticians have been invited to contribute with texts that explore our constantly shifting and ever-evolving capacity for orienting ourselves (psychologically and physically).
Born and raised in Denmark, Olafur Eliasson is of Icelandic extraction. For many years now, Eliasson has been living and working in Berlin. Until May 19, it is possible to view Olafur Eliassons solo exhibition,Funcionamiento silencioso, in the Palacio de Cristal at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. And up until June 15, another solo exhibition, Sonne statt Regen, is being shown in the Kunstbau at the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
For images and further information please view www.olafureliasson.net/press
Or contact commissioner, Mrs. Gitte Oerskou, at Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Hoegh-Guldbergs Gade 2, DK – 8000 Aarhus C, tel: +45 8613 5255, fax: +45 8613 3351, e-mail: go@aarhuskunstmuseum.dk
