‘Life’ By Olaffur Eliasson At The Fondation Beyeler
Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2021. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Mark Niedermann
If you need to add one reason to visit or return to the Fondation Beyeler, here is stunning one: LIFE by Olafur Eliasson… an artwork open night and day, inside and outside the building…
In less than twenty years, the Fondation Beyeler has the most visited museum in Switzerland. The pioneer spirit of Ernst & Hildy Beyeler is vivid thanks to Sam Keller, its vibrant director. Beside the stunning building by Renzo Piano, the serene garden, the Fondation always offers an exquisite programme of exhibitions.
Life is the new creation of Olafur Eliasson and it literally pushes the existing doors of the Basel institution.
Anyone visiting the Fondation Beyeler in the next months can walk into the building at any time of day, for the exhibition is open day and night and there are no doors or windows keeping the world out. The landscape surrounding the building spills into the interior, flooding the gallery spaces with a brackish, artificially green pond in which a variety of plants thrive. Visitors may wind their ways through the exhibition along dark wooden walkways, accompanied by the ambient sounds of insects, traffic, and other people – as well as the smells of the plants and water.
For Life, Eliasson has removed a broad section of the Fondation Beyeler’s windows. This act, which the artist describes as ‘caring’, opens up the museum to its surroundings, to the plants and animals of the public park, to the urban landscape, to the changing weather, and to the fluctuations in light and darkness.
View of the surrounding landscape, a publicly accessible garden, become visible as visitors progress through the gallery spaces along a number of possible routes that allow them time to slow down, wander, and contemplate each of the subtly different spaces.
Institution, visitors, and other life forms are thrown together in a space of coexistence. Life blurs the separation between outside and inside, museum and artwork – an effect that extends to Eliasson’s wish to keep the gallery open day and night.
Light and darkness significantly change the experience of Life. How it is experienced depends radically on the time of the day : the water appears bright green in daylight and fluoresces at night, an effect achieved through a combination of ultraviolet light and a fluorescent dye in the water, known as uranine.
Water, one of the main elements in the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, has long played a central role in Eliasson’s practice, where it appears in various states – in waterfalls, raindrops, rainbows, ice blocks or clouds of steam. The water fills the exhibition, connecting the interior with the outdoor pond and creating a continuous waterscape. The surface of the water, depending on the light conditions and the weather, reveals a spectrum of reflections that involve the surrounding space as well as the visitors, making them co-producers of the artwork.
The pond in the museum’s garden connects with the gallery’s interior spaces to create a continuous waterscape. A great number of plants, all of which thrive in shallow water, inhabit the surface of the pond : floating fern, dwarf water lilies, shellflower, red root floater, and water caltrop. Some of these were already an integral part of the existing pond. Others will settle in this habitat during the course of the exhibition. These interlopers enter into dialogue with existing flora of the museum park, the bushes, grass, and trees there, some of which are centuries old. The result is an interpenetrating, intertwined growth, Eliasson takes inspiration from the anthropologist Natasha Myers, who invites us to ‘vegetalise’ our senses in order to grasp the potential of plant-people relations. This stems from her proposal for an alternative to the Anthropocene, the present geological epoch defined by human activity : a new epoch that she calls ‘Plathroposcene’. Myer’s idea are rooted in the knowledge that plants are what made this planet liveable.
The art work offers the opportunity to activate the senses, with more than just sight – through the smells of the plants and water, the sounds of the surroundings, and the sensation of the moisture in the air – it activates the full sensorium. The sense of time passing becomes part of the artwork. In Eliasson’s words, the exhibition tries to ‘unlock time’, to make its presence apparent not as a standardised unit of measure bus as a lived, felt sense, inseparable from experience.
While Life gives the impression that nature has taken over the Fondation, it is simultaneously clear that the exhibition evokes a profoundly sculpted experience. Eliasson sees the artwork as a naturalcultural landscape for humans and non-humans alike.
Visitors are encouraged to experience themselves withing an expanded landscape, never alone, never fully separated, but as composite beings, invariably caught up in larger, unruly ecologies. Life, as a living organism, is subject to constant change. Exhaled air is inhaled again by other living beings and light is converted into oxygen by plants through photosynthesis.
Life is also about conspiring – playing on the origin of the word (‘to breathe with’) as well as the dictionary definition of ‘acting in harmony toward a common end’. It is about conspiring with others and with the planet. Recognising the interconnectedness of complex earth systems invites us to develop narratives for the future in full understanding that humans are not the primary species on this planet.
Cameras in the gallery spaces and in the garden haven been installed to inhabit the perspective of non-human creatures, placed, for example, just above the surface of the water or high up in a tree. The cameras are equipped with a number of optical filters that mimic the perceptual apparatuses of other species. A multi-channel live stream, accessible day and night, alludes to more-than-human perceptions of time and introduces a range of multi-species perspectives of the exhibition and its surroundings.