Olafur Eliasson is bringing his immersive installation to the Tate Modern this July, in what will be the biggest survey of his work to date.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors came to see his “Weather Project” work in the Tate's Turbine Hall fifteen years ago. The installation became one of the most visited in the gallery's history and this summer's enormous survey exhibition is shaping up to be even more popular.
A 45-meter tunnel of blinding fog will be installed as part of the “Your Blind Passenger” work. The installation, previously shown at Copenhagen’s Arken Museum of Modern Art in 2010, creates a densely fogged environment, which provides visibility at just 1.5 meters. The limited visibility initially mimics partial blindness in that, as Eliasson explained to the Guardian recently, “very quickly you realise, and I mean this quite literally, that you are not completely blind after all, you have a lot of other senses which start to kick in.” He went on to note, “It shows that the relativity of our senses is much higher than we think, we have it in our capacity to recalibrate or at least stop being numb.”
Only a handful of visitors will be able to walk the vast 45-meter tunnel at a time. The scale and immersive nature of Eliasson's works have been known to profoundly move visitors. He joked that some couples were very moved by his “Weather Project” installation and did a little more than bask in its light.
The Tate Modern will exhibit over 30 works from almost three decades of Eliasson’s works in “Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life.” The exhibition will run from 11 July 2019 to 5 January 2020.
