Press Release

Singapore Art Museum (SAM) presents Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey, the inaugural survey exhibition in Southeast Asia dedicated to the work of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. This travelling exhibition showcases a broad range of artworks across diverse media, touching on major themes of his three-decade-long practice—embodiment, experience and perception, as well as the urgency of climate action and more-than-human perspectives.

International Archives 1st half of 2024

Olafur Eliasson, Your curious journey

SAM, Singapore (Singapore)

10.05 - 22.09.2024

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In his art practice, Eliasson has been driven by the desire to make the ungraspable tangible. Artworks like Beauty (1993), Symbiotic seeing (2020), Ventilator (1997) and Adrift compass (2019) use ephemeral materials such as light, wind, fog and water to conjure evanescent phenomena—shimmering rainbows, swirling mists, the split-second sculptural form of a spouting fountain—or make invisible elements of our surroundings like air or magnetic fields palpable. Other works, like The cubic structural evolution project (2004), invite visitors to collaborate, creating communal experiences and building shared worlds. SAM is excited to be the exclusive hosts of Symbiotic seeing and The cubic structural evolution project, which will not continue to subsequent locations of this travelling exhibition.

To compensate for the distances that the exhibition will travel, Eliasson and his team have endeavoured to reduce its carbon footprint through changes in installation practice, maintenance, packaging, energy consumption and, especially, transport. As such, many components of this show reached Singapore by sea—in fact, one artwork necessitates this for its creation. Consisting of drawing devices installed in crates, produced by a chance process that unfolded while the artworks were in transit, The seismographic testimony of distance (Singapore-Berlin, no. 1 to no. 6) will be revealed only upon its uncrating and shown for the first time at SAM.

Environmental themes extend to other works, too. The last seven days of glacial ice (2024), which also makes its debut at SAM, simulates the melting process of a fragment of ice from a nearby glacier at Diamond Beach. The glacier melt series 1999/2019 (2019), a series of photographs taken by the artist in Iceland in 1999 and again from the same perspectives in 2019, shows the country’s impressive glaciers receding over the past 20 years due to the warming climate. While melting glaciers may seem a far-removed reality from tropical Singapore, these works demonstrate how distinct environments in distant locales may be part of a larger ecological framework of cyclicality and consequence.

SAM is the first stop for Your curious journey. Afterwards, it travels to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand (December 2024–March 2025); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (May–August 2025); Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia (November 2025–April 2026); and Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, the Philippines (June–October 2026).

Exhibition 10 May - 22 September 2024. Singapore Art Museum, 39 Keppel Rd #01-02 Tanjong Pagar Distripark - 089065 Singapour (Singapour).

Olafur Eliasson, The glacier melt series 1999/2019, 2019. Installation view, Tate Modern, London. Photo: Michael Waldrep / Studio Olafur Eliasson. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2019 Olafur Eliasson.