Author: Olafur Eliasson

Publisher: Hatje Cantz Pub

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9783775713771

In Olafur Eliasson's exhibition The Blind Pavilionfor the Danish pavilion at the most recent Venice Biennale, virtually all the strategies that the artist had employed up until now were activated: mirror reflections, glass kaleidoscopes, stretches of stairway, architectural interventions, and camera obscuras. An all-encompassing exhibition, it cancelled out the dividing lines between work and viewer, between outside and inside, between art and science. A parallel counterpart to the pavilion, rather than a mere representation of it, is the book The Blind Pavilion. Created by Eliasson in close collaboration with Danish author Svend Uge Madsen, who has persistently challenged our notions of time and space in his writings, The Blind Paviliongathers writing by authors, poets, and theoreticians who were invited to contribute texts that explore our constantly shifting and ever-evolving capacity for "orienting" ourselves. The texts serve as contributions to an examination of how we physically and psychologically orient ourselves to the world--and of what happens when we are deprived of one or more of our orientation possibilities, for example our ability to hear and remember, to expect something, or to experience the passage of time.