Olafur Eliasson: Riverbed

The main work in Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is a giant landscape that unfolds throughout the South Wing of the museum in one great sweep as a major intervention in the museum’s usual administration of art in space, affording the viewer the opportunity to think about the aesthetic experience as more than just the encounter between the visitor and works on the floor or walls.

Since the beginning of the collaboration it has been clear that a solo exhibition of Eliasson’s work at Louisiana would inevitably be a radical, site-specific exhibition dealing with the reality of the museum as an institution and physical locality, and at the same time would focus on local sensory experience in a global perspective. The transitions between inside and outside, culture and staged nature will become fluid and transitory – and the progress of the visitor through the museum take centre stage.

Although Olafur Eliasson’s stone landscape may look like a stress-test of Louisiana’s physical capacity, it is a manifestation of the fundamental idea of the museum: to subject itself to something that both challenges the expectations of everyday life and puts it into perspective. In this case the empty landscape can perhaps restore to us a time and space purged of information and meaning. We can breathe for a moment; no one expects anything special from us – we are in an agenda-free zone.

Presence at an exhibition has taken on a new meaning with Olafur Eliasson’s Riverbed. We are both at the exhibition and on the exhibition... Movement through park and space in Humlebæk has always been at the heart of the experience – the architects have made sure of that, and Eliasson wishes to profile this as the most important feature at Louisiana. Everything can start from this point.

The model room of the exhibition shows one kind of beginning – the model in which the world stands still for a moment; while in the cinema, in the museum’s Hall Gallery, we are received into its physically unfolding flow: a variety of experiences, a variety of modes of presence, all with a sensory impact.

until January 4, 2014
Olafur Eliasson
Riverbed
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl Strandvej 13
Humlebæk, Denmark