The sky in Denmark is often changeable: banks of leaden clouds alternate with sudden, bright, and melancholy clearings. The wind, strong and constant, makes it unpredictable, turning it into an unstable field of clear openings and driving rain. Since the eve of the summer solstice, however, there is a new vantage point from which to observe it: not outdoors, but inside the Aros Aarhus Art Museum, through As Seen Below – The Dome, James Turrell’s new monumental work and the largest skyspace ever created by the artist in a museum context.
“This is a transformative moment for ARoS. With As Seen Below, we are not only presenting a landmark instal lation by one of the most important artists of our time, but also creating a place of wonder, reflection, and connection”, said Rebecca Matthews, museum director and CEO of ARoS.
The work thus not only strengthens ARoS’s position as an international platform for immersive installations, in continuity with iconic works already in its collection such as Olafur Eliasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama, but also marks Turrell’s one hundredth Skyspace, distilling over fifty years of research into the threshold between art, architecture, and the phenomenology of vision.
Access is via an underground corridor that prepares visitors for a rarefied environment, dominated by a dome pierced by a central oculus. It is a phenomenological space designed to encourage silent contemplation of the shifting qualities of natural light, where the sky becomes a two-dimensional surface while artificial light continually redefines the limits of the space.
At 16 meters in height and 40 meters in diameter, the installation asserts itself through scale and ambition, introducing three different modes of experience. In the Open Sky phase, the opening remains visible and the sky appears as a chromatic field in constant transformation.
This is a transformative moment for ARoS. With As Seen Below, we are not only presenting a landmark instal lation by one of the most important artists of our time, but also creating a place of wonder, reflection, and connection
Rebecca Matthews, museum director and CEO of ARoS.
In Colour Shift, the oculus closes to concentrate perception on the interior: the walls lose their solidity and the space seems to dissolve into light, which becomes the sole protagonist. Finally, the Twilight sessions accompany the transition between day and night, synchronizing the internal light variations with those of the atmosphere.
The installation concludes a broader expansion of the museum developed with the architectural firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen, which also includes a new subterranean gallery, the Salling Galleriet, and an outdoor public space. The project itself took ten years to complete—a relatively long period, necessary both to resolve the technical challenges of such an ambitious vision and to establish the ideal conditions for creating a new primary experience of space, suspended in the stretched time of light and sky.