Olafur Eliasson in conversation with Josef O’Connor at 180 Studios
On October 1st, CIRCA launched Lifeworld, a groundbreaking series of five site-specific works by Olafur Eliasson, appearing across screens in London, Seoul, Berlin, New York, and on the public digital space of WeTransfer.com. The launch included an in-depth conversation at 180 Studios, where Eliasson joined CIRCA Founder and Artistic Director, Josef O’Connor, to discuss the inspirations and ideas behind this new commission.
The works of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) explore the relevance of art in the world at large. Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows – featuring installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and film – have appeared in major museums around the globe. His art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self and community.
Eliasson is internationally-renowned for his public installations that challenge the way we perceive and co-create our environments. In 2003, he made ‘The weather project’, a glowing indoor sun shrouded in mist at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London. In 2008, Eliasson constructed four expansive artificial waterfalls along the Manhattan and Brooklyn shorelines for ‘The New York City Waterfalls’. He has also explored art’s potential to address climate change: for ‘Ice Watch’, he brought large blocks of free-floating glacial ice to the city centres of Copenhagen in 2014, Paris in 2015, and London in 2018. Passers-by could touch fragments of the Greenlandic glacial ice and witness its fragility as it disappeared before them. On the occasion of the 2020 German Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Eliasson created ‘Earth Speakr’ together with children around the world and support from the German Federal Foreign Office; the global artwork invites kids to speak up for the planet. In 2022, Eliasson opened ‘Shadows travelling on the sea of the day’, a cluster of large site-specific mirror pavilions that draw attention to the delicate habitat of the Qatari desert outside Doha.
In 2012, Eliasson started the social business Little Sun, and in 2014, he and Sebastian Behmann founded Studio Other Spaces, an office for art and architecture. In 2019, Eliasson was named UNDP Goodwill Ambassador for climate action. In 2023, he received the Praemium Imperiale from the Japanese imperial family for outstanding contributions to the development, promotion, and progress of the arts.
Located in Berlin, Studio Olafur Eliasson comprises a large team of craftspeople, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialised technicians.
180 The Strand is the heart of London’s creative community, an iconic Brutalist building that has been transformed into a cultural centre. At its core is 180 Studios, a network of production and exhibition spaces that supports emerging talent and provides a platform for creative growth.
