Bold claim: Art can rewire how we see the world and our place within it, and Olafur Eliasson’s Presence makes that possibility feel urgent, personal, and almost revolutionary. The moment you glimpse the colossal sun hanging over the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, you sense you’re not just admiring a sculpture—you’re being invited to participate in a conversation about climate, perception, and collective responsibility. The sun’s roiling surface, alive with the impression of countless micro-explosions, seems to respond when you pause, a reminder that your presence matters and that action has consequences.
In the glow of this orb, you encounter Eliasson himself, the Icelandic-Danish artist renowned for immersive installations that bend light, color, and space to challenge how we experience reality. Arrival at Presence, a sweeping exhibition spanning three decades of his practice, reveals a gallery transformed: a journey through light, texture, and movement, anchored by photography that foregrounds the climate crisis. The show resurrects Riverbed, his 2014 room packed with sand, pebbles, and stones, now placed alongside works that bend perception and illuminate environmental themes from fresh angles.
The sun—also called Presence—evokes The Weather Project, Eliasson’s celebrated 2003 milestone at Tate Modern. That piece evolved into a public lounge where strangers found a shared heartbeat, a sense Eliasson calls “we-ness.” That essence seems to resurface here, as visitors become part of a growing communal mood.
The artist described a key moment during a chat with me and curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow: when you move, the sun moves; your very presence makes a difference, and your actions carry weight. Eliasson treats audiences as “active co-producers” of the art, underscoring that every observer’s vantage point shapes what is seen. A novel piece in the show, Your Negotiable Vulnerability Seen From Two Perspectives (2025), uses polarized light to reveal how perception shifts as you shift position—black can flip to white, colors can flare or fade.
Among the more intimate works, Beauty (1993) turns ordinary dripping water into a transcendent moment. It isn’t magic, but a carefully angled curtain of droplets interacting with light to create the sense of a veil between worlds, a place where a rainbow might appear when you stand in the right spot.
Presence unfolds like a living Tardis: rooms dim and bright, sometimes jarringly so, each corner offering something unexpected. One chamber is so dark that an attendant reminds visitors to let their eyes adjust; another feels antiseptic in its brightness. The experience is designed to disorient and re-center, inviting curiosity rather than passive viewing.
Eliasson’s upbringing—splitting time between Denmark and Iceland, with Copenhagen schooling and Icelandic countryside holidays—shaped a sensibility attuned to primal landscapes and their fragility. His Icelandic photographs anchor the show in a reality both breathtaking and unsettling, especially relevant as Iceland and Australia alike face rapid climatic shifts. The Glacier Melt series, created two decades apart (1999 and 2019), starkly documents the accelerating retreat of ice.
Riverbed, acquired by Goma after the 2019 Water exhibition, takes on new meaning when viewed against the backdrop of climate anxiety: a deliberate optical trickle winding through stone evokes what remains when glaciers disappear. Eliasson’s core message is not to despair but to cultivate courage—the courage to stop numbing oneself to uncomfortable truths and to acknowledge that collapse is a living phenomenon we must confront, not a distant catastrophe.
Crucially, he rejects a narrow division between nature inside and outside the gallery. There is no true boundary—inside and outside are interwoven; the gallery simply offers a clearer lens to see what outside ecosystems already reveal, often polluted, politicized, and weaponized by human systems.
Though he often speaks in somber terms about the planet’s trajectory, Eliasson remains a “prisoner of hope.” He draws inspiration from Indigenous philosophies that honor nature as kin and from movements seeking legal personhood for natural features like mountains, rivers, and forests. These shifts away from a purely human-centric worldview reassure him that people can change how they see the world—and, by extension, how they act.
Presence aims to cultivate both awareness and agency, not by delivering ready-made answers but by nurturing a sense of connected possibility. A highlight invites visitors to collaborate on a collective dream city using 500,000 white Lego bricks—the Cubic Structural Evolution Project from 2004—an exercise in mutual eruption of ideas and shared creativity. As curator Barlow explains, the goal is to spark a chain reaction: to dream together and redesign how energy, materials, and ingenuity circulate within cities.
The planning process itself reflected Eliasson’s collaborative ethos. Barlow spent two months embedded with Studio Olafur Eliasson, navigating a dynamic network of architects, craftspeople, historians, and technicians. The artist often asked for feedback: Where am I blind? What do you see that I don’t? The exchange, she notes, produced a dialogue where perspectives could clash, then be reconciled to yield more nuanced work.
What emerges from this exchange is a generosity of spirit that permeates the project. Long conversations, unhurried observations, and a willingness to share the creative stage reveal a philosophy: creation thrives when those involved feel seen and heard. For Eliasson, the goal is not simply to astonish but to soften—an act he equates with resilience and tenderness, a form of artistry that can be fiercely transformative. In his own words, presence is not a momentary sensation but a sustainable practice—the art of exhaling, of allowing room for nuance and care to shape tomorrow.
Olafur Eliasson: Presence runs at the Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) in Meanjin/Brisbane through July 12, 2026.
