The Thousands

Taking a retrospective glance at a contemporary artist can be a difficult thing. In trying to collate a group of work to represent their practice, museums often fall short. But Danish-born artist Olafur Eliasson has combated this tendency with Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, an exhibition that plays with and against our understanding of how one can experience a museum and its works.  

Originally realised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this is the first time the exhibition will be shown outside of the US and includes early apparatus works like the luminous curtain of mist, ‘Beauty’ (1993).

While the scale of the exhibition can be overwhelming, each situation that Eliasson creates has a tangible and specific sense of time. With ‘Moss wall’ (1994) and ’360° A Room for All Colours’ (2002), it seems as though Eliasson is asking you to take a moment; to consider how one can engage rather than simply observe an artwork.**This critical interaction that Eliasson evokes extends beyond the walls of the MCA. In collaboration with the MCA, TwoThousand has been curating a micro-site of reviews, reports and commentaries of the artist’s multi-faceted practice outside of the white cube.

Whether walking through the exhibition itself, or perusing the micro-site, Eliasson has produced a group of situations that force the viewer to recognise their presence as a force that defines how, and what, we see.