Local career lamp
National career lamp
International career lamp
Olafur Eliasson’s light objects at Karriere resemble beautiful luminous eyes that are looking at you. Deep and brilliant in colour and intensity, they hold your gaze once you’ve spotted them. To look at these lamps is like seeing yourself see – literally. Eliasson is one of the world’s most significant artists within his field. His works are based around the research of human perception and sense cognition – how time, space, colour, light and sensation occur as phenomena for us. Heightening our awareness of the fact that it is through our bodies that we inhabit the world, and that through a better grasp of the nature of perception, we can gain insight into our existence in the world. In The Weather Project, Eliasson’s renowned 2003 installation at Tate Modern, gallery-goers basked, meditated and picnicked in the light of a huge sun. This “sun’ consisted of hundreds of monofrequency lamps placed in a semi-circle under a mirrored ceiling – a feature that doubled the perception of the light effect, creating a round sun. It also made the public visible to themselves in the work and spurts of “mist’ in the space meant that it presented as stunningly beautiful and captivating – a complete and cohesive work. In The Weather Project, the whole installation’s mirrors, lamps and electrical cables lay exposed on the reverse side of the artificial sun, and the visiting public were invited to wise up to how the effects had been produced. Even though no one was in any doubt as to whether it was the real sun they saw, access to the actual construction of the work opened up to a concrete, visual understanding of perception. An understanding of what we already ‘know’ and ‘grasp’ through our bodies. This feature is also present in Eliasson’s light objects at Karriere. Acting as lamps and so fulfilling a functional role, they hang over the tables, over the bar and are sited at either end of Karriere. The twisted louvres that form the lampshades are clad with a foil of microscopic prismatic structures that reflect the surrounding space. You can see both yourself and the space around you reflected in them. But the foil’s further function is to break light waves and display their colours, and it does so during the day when the lampshades are illuminated by daylight from the outside, and after dark when illuminated from within by electric light bulbs. The feature illustrates how colour materializes when light is reflected from it and strikes the retina. In other words, then, you can see yourself see when you look into Eliasson’s light objects – and it’s a beautiful sight. Just take a look into the eyes of the person next to you. (PKE)
Olafur Eliasson, born 1967, Denmark
www.olafureliasson.net