The space is pitch-black except for a burning orange slice projected along the wall. Even if you close your eyes, the fiery line remains. The floor is uneven, like the surface of the moon. From the next dark room comes the sound of rushing water. A light flashes for a tenth of a second to reveal a fountain, its spray frozen like a still life for that illuminated instant.
Many such dreamy scenarios unfold across a string of dimly lit rooms as part of “Contact,” Olafur Eliasson’s first solo exhibition in France since 2002, opening tomorrow at the Frank Gehry–designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Like most of the Danish-Icelandic artist’s works, the installations—more experiential than visual—call the relationship between space, time, and the natural world into question.
Eliasson has become known for these sorts of immersive environments. In his famous Weather Project in 2003, he created a massive sun in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with a semicircle made of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps (a low-electricity, high-impact lighting source typically used in highway tunnels or as emergency lights on ferries); the other half of the circle was formed by a reflection in the mirrored ceiling. Viewers would sprawl across the floor of the hall, gazing at their own reflection while basking in the sun’s glow.
When viewing the works in “Contact,” people are similarly held in place, interacting with physical space in some new way. In Map for Unthought Thoughts , sticks are arranged around a light source in the middle of a dark room, creating a striated pattern across the floor and a geometric motif on the walls. As visitors enter the room, their silhouettes are cast against the backdrop. The simpler Touch invites viewers to pick up a hunk of meteorite. As they handle the otherworldly material, a striking blue shadow is cast on the nearby wall. On the roof, Eliasson installed an apparatus that tracks the sun and, at certain hours of the day, sheds light onto a multifaceted geometric sculpture he designed for the building. The exhibition, as Eliasson explains, intends to “address that which lies at the edge of our senses and knowledge.”
Through February 16, 2015, at Fondation Louis Vuitton, 8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, Bois de Boulogne, Paris; fondationlouisvuittonr
