COPENHAGEN.- Eliasson’s installation Din blinde passager (Your blind passenger) is a 90-metre-long tunnel. Entering the tunnel, your body is surrounded by dense fog. With visibility at just 1.5 metres, museumgoers have to use senses other than sight to orient themselves in relation to their surroundings. Accordingly, the work demands your singular, intense attention.

The exhibition is the final instalment in ARKEN’s three-year UTOPIA series. Eliasson completes the project with a work highlighting the utopian potential inherent in the individual’s relation to the surrounding world. The exhibition is on view through November 27, 2011.

Eliasson says: “For me, utopia is linked to the now, the moment between one second and the next. It constitutes a possibility that is actualised and converted into reality, an opening where concepts like subject and object, inside and outside, proximity and distance are tossed into the air and redefined. Our sense of orientation is challenged and the coordinates of our spaces, collective and personal, have to be renegotiated. Changeability and mobility are at the core of utopia.”

Eliasson personally describes his works as “experiments.” The artist employs light, colour and natural phenomena like fog and waves to test how physical movement and the interaction of body and brain influence our perception of our surroundings. A central idea is to get us, the viewers or users of his works, to examine the conditions of our perceptions through individual experience, enabling us to reassess our concepts of what it means to be and act in the world.

Christian Gether, director of ARKEN, says: “Olafur Eliasson is extremely interesting, because he takes a new view of the institution of the museum. He does not see the museum as separate from the world but as a concentrate of the world – a space made available for the contemplation of human relations. Hence, he is the ideal artist to conclude the UTOPIA project.”