art and nature

Back in August I visited Olafur Eliasson's brilliant retrospective at the Tate Modern (still showing until Jan 5, 2020) and I was hoping to publish a photo story about it, but the exhibition allowed photography only for personal use, and the Ts and Cs for the use of the official photos somehow clashed with my publishers' conditions, so it didn't work out. So strictly non-commercially and for personal use only, I've put 15 of my own photos on flickr (see this album) and the text here:

The art of shaping our environment

Art reflects our environment. Art can also create new environments that we can enter to reflect on ourselves and our place in the world. In the Anthropocene, humanity is transforming the planet in many largely uncontrolled ways. Artists like Olafur Eliasson are reflecting on this transformation with their smaller, more controlled installations of artificial environments.

Eliasson, whose works are currently featured in a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, UK, rose to fame in 2003 with “The Weather Project” for which he installed a gigantic sunset in the turbine hall of the same gallery. The retrospective now shows how his dialogue with nature evolved from structural aspects to perceptions of environment and climate. The show includes indoor installations of a very dense fog, rain on a window, water waves, a moss wall and a rainbow of sorts.

The environment is only one side of the equation, however. What turns the boxed weather phenomena into art is the observation of how humans interact with them, how they disappear in the fog or marvel at the water features. Accordingly, many other works are providing the visitor with an environment where they see themselves – as colourful shadows, for instance, or as fragmented reflections when they walk through a multi-faceted kaleidoscope.

The take-home message seems to be: We are our environment, our environment is us, all is one dynamic system. That can be more easily grasped on the scale of an art gallery, but it is also true for planet Earth.




(own photo)