On a large, pristine worktable, white Lego bricks — tens of thousands of them — lie quietly before a window overlooking Singapore’s historic port area, Keppel Harbour. Here, in the Engine Room at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), I spot more than a passing resemblance between the enormous, brightly coloured shipping containers in the distance, and the little plastic cuboids heaped on the table.
Over the past several months, the loose toy bricks have been transformed, with the help of the museum’s many visitors, into a labyrinthine landscape in miniature.
Titled The cubic structural evolution project (2004), Olafur Eliasson’s interactive installation invites us to participate in the artistic process, and, in so doing, to become active co-creators of an ever-evolving artwork.
With the wall text between the gallery’s two doors encouraging the visitor to choose where to begin, Eliasson’s very first survey exhibition in Southeast Asia, Your curious journey, spotlights the audience’s role in engaging meaningfully with works of art.
“There might be some more natural starting points, but by and large the exhibition is incredibly open-ended. That’s meant to empower and encourage visitors to chart their own journeys through the exhibition,” said curator Joella Kiu.
“With the inclusion of the pronominal ‘You’ in the title, it is quite clear that Eliasson wants it to be your experience that completes the exhibition,” explained curatorial assistant Angelica Ong.
By encouraging museumgoers to exercise agency in interacting with his works, Eliasson aims to restore “a sense of presence, of feeling alive and of engaging fully with our senses” — in other words, to encourage us to be conscious of what and how we’re seeing.
Seeing, sensing
These are worthy and ambitious aims and the curatorial team at SAM has done well in creating the necessary conditions to realise them.
For one, Eliasson’s works have been curated to complement the architecture of the gallery spaces at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. The exhibition experience feels seamless and wholly immersive, thanks to the carefully calibrated spatial conditions (light, darkness, space, sound) under which his installations have been allowed to work their magic.
Of note is Eliasson’s installation Symbiotic seeing (2020), one of the “Singapore exclusives” in this exhibition, which will next travel to Auckland, Taipei, Jakarta, and Manila.
While Symbiotic seeing was first presented within a rectangular space in Zürich, visitors to SAM will encounter an elliptical version of the work. Here, a glassy, undulating “ceiling” of mist melds into the room’s curved walls, enveloping the viewer in a space of contemplation.
In terms of visual and sensorial impact, Beauty (1993) was, for me, the highlight of the show. In a darkened room, a delicate, gossamer curtain of mist flits in and out of view, each water droplet a prism through which light splinters into iridescent colour.
As you walk around the room, the work shifts according to your point of view. In fact, you can even walk through the mist, shattering the image. The changeable nature of Beauty reminds us that the visible world isn’t as stable as we might think — each individual constructs knowledge via his or her subjective position in the world. It’s these acts of seeing and sensing that the artist wants us to, well, see.
Surveying the breadth of Eliasson’s practice
Beyond highlighting Eliasson’s central concerns, the show’s strength lies in its breadth. For Singapore audiences who may be encountering Eliasson’s oeuvre for the first time, Your curious journey is a robust introduction to the artist’s three-decade long career, spanning a diverse selection of paintings, sculpture, installations, and video works from the late 1990s to the present day.
There are works on paper, such as Eliasson’s Wind writings (2023) and two iterations of Sun drawing (2023), created via “drawing machines” which transform weather conditions into circular compositions. In the same section is Eliasson’s iconic installation Ventilator (1997): suspended by a cable, a single electric fan swings wildly over the viewers’ heads, propelled by the air currents it generates.
Across the hall, a huge wall carpeted in reindeer moss spotlights Eliasson’s longstanding interest in blurring the lines between organic and artificial environments, inviting us to question where “nature” ends and “culture” begins.
Thematic explorations
Eliasson’s oeuvre is thematically and theoretically dense, drawing from fields as diverse and complex as philosophy and ecology. But, a few brief wall texts aside, Your curious journey largely allows the artworks to “speak for themselves” — the artwork captions aren’t displayed on the walls, for instance.
This approach has both pros and cons. For one, there’s no denying the sheer visceral impact of experiencing Eliasson’s work in the flesh. Leaving out overt interpretative cues like artwork captions places the visitor’s personal encounter with the work front and centre. In this respect, Object defined by activity (then) (2009) stuck with me.
Walking into the installation, I felt almost like I’d been reduced to a pair of disembodied eyes and ears in near-total darkness, my senses saturated solely by the “object”: a water fountain illuminated by intermittent bursts of bright, white light.
The effect is uncanny. With each flash of light, the arching streams of water appear completely static, like still frames of a movie. Are we looking at icy crystals suspended in mid-air — or, as the swooshing noises of running water remind us, streams of moving liquid?
Object defined by activity (then) unmoors us from something as basic as the appearance of moving water. As it turns out, ordinary reality can look vastly different under different lighting conditions. If what we’re seeing isn’t fixed or objective, can we really draw any conclusions about the world around us? Eliasson has a nice turn of phrase for these uncertainties: the “relativity of reality.”
Going deeper?
But despite the visual impact of Eliasson’s works, I think that appreciating his practice more fully calls for some understanding of its roots.
Born in Copenhagen in 1967, Eliasson attended art school in the late 80s to 90s, at a time when “art” no longer referred solely to discrete, tangible objects. Instead, art encompassed even the most intangible, ephemeral elements, including light and space — thanks largely to the legacy of Conceptual Art, which rebelled against the increasing commercialisation of art.
Rather than producing impressive objects for the homes of wealthy collectors, artists like Eliasson constructed immediate sensory experiences which couldn’t be grasped or possessed like paintings or sculptures, hoping to heighten their viewers’ awareness of how they moved through the world via various modes of perception, including sight.
It’s within these art-historical contexts that Eliasson has made his mark. Leaving out these lengthy explanations carves out space for audiences to interpret Eliasson’s works on their own terms. But in a world where flows of visual imagery are often flattened into bite-sized objects of entertainment (and monetised — think social media marketing), museumgoers might easily default to the same passive, inattentive modes of consumption that we would bring to a blockbuster movie or an amusing light show. This, of course, runs counter to the artist’s intentions, and maybe the purpose of art museums: to jolt us out of our usual blindness to the things in front of us.
It’s not an easy balance to strike. When does communicating an artwork’s stylistic, historical, and thematic contexts empower audiences to engage more profoundly with it? And at what point does all this information simply bleed into a mess of clunky jargon and artspeak? Where do we draw the line?
“There are different scales at which we produce material and content to meet varying audiences where they’re at,” explained Joella Kiu. While the visitor’s visceral encounter with art forms the basis of the exhibition, the exhibition paraphernalia — brochures, catalogue essays complete with multicoloured marginalia — were conceived as “touch points” for audiences who might be interested in digging deeper.
And indeed, with an artist like Eliasson — whose works have been meticulously documented and written about both in print and on the web — it’s not hard to find out more, and I appreciate that the exhibition has given audiences the latitude to do so.
Olafur Eliasson in Singapore?
SAM’s presentation of Your curious journey also makes a commendable, albeit at times confusing, effort to bridge the distance between Eliasson’s glacial vistas and sunny, sweltering Singapore. The work that most successfully locates Eliasson’s concerns within a local and regional context is a brand new piece titled The seismographic testimony of distance (Berlin–Singapore, no. 1 to no. 6) (2024).
For this exhibition, most of the artworks were shipped from Eliasson’s Berlin studio to Singapore by sea. In the shipment, Eliasson also set up six drawing machines over blank sheets of paper.
The result? A series of erratic, idiosyncratic lines that make visible the artworks’ bumpy journey across the world, much as a seismogram documents ground movements caused by earthquakes. It’s a clever way of pulling back the curtain on the art world’s reliance on moving objects and people across extreme distances, often at great cost to the environment — artworks shipped by air have a huge carbon footprint.
Apart from this one site-specific work, however, I found myself wondering what SAM’s “Southeast Asian perspective” on Your curious journey was. Where might Eliasson sit in relation to the other artists from Indonesia or the Philippines, for example, whom we’ve encountered more frequently in SAM’s galleries?
stainless steel, and aluminium, 152.5 × 300 × 70 cm.
What might works such as The last seven days of glacial ice (2024) mean for audiences living in tropical countries — where melting ice caps seem distant from our everyday experiences of the changing climate?
Closing thoughts
Nonetheless, I think SAM’s efforts to widen the geographical parameters of its “Southeast Asian perspective” beyond showing only artists “from” the region — however these increasingly nebulous national identities may be defined in our globalised world — could open new doors. Having international heavyweights show in Singapore benefits not just local art audiences, but also contributes to institutional growth.
Reflecting on how the process of developing the exhibition had “pushed the technical knowledge of the team,” Kiu and Ong recounted the challenges they’d faced, from setting up false ceilings to sourcing for a specific fan model for Ventilator. “We’ve definitely been able to grow and develop, while challenging what we would conventionally do, to strengthen our ability to produce a show of this scale,” said Kiu.
I’m looking forward to how this experience might pave the way for SAM to introduce other acclaimed international artists to us in the near future.
But for now — if you haven’t seen the show yet, catch it before it closes on 22 September. Your curious journey is a fantastic opportunity to get acquainted with a significant body of work that not only holds conceptual water but also grounds its big ideas in immediate, visceral aesthetic experiences.
You don’t need to be well-versed in every facet of Eliasson’s philosophy to enjoy the show — what’s more important, as always, is being fully present and alive to the experience of seeing, perhaps in a different light.
In other words: let curiosity lead the way.
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Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey runs at the Singapore Art Museum till 22 September 2024. Visit singaporeartmuseum.sg to find out more.
Header image: Installation view of The cubic structural evolution project (2004), white Lego bricks, wood, and mirror, dimensions variable.
