Olaffur Eliasson photographed for LUX in his Berlin studio by Simon de Pury

Olafur Eliasson is an artist of global renown, a former breakdancing champion, an academic and a passionate champion of the planet. Simon de Pury, auctioneer extraordinaire and long-time LUX collaborator, creates art collections for the world’s super-wealthy and runs celebrity charity auctions with a biting silver tongue. De Pury travelled to Eliasson’s Berlin studio and home, where the two discussed light, communication, birthdays, art and the human rights of the planet’s plants and creatures

Simon de Pury: First, a question I often asked when I was interviewing someone for a job: if you could be an animal, what would you be?

Olafur Eliasson: I would be a jellyfish, I think. They move so graciously and they’re very slow. I like that a lot.

The Serpentine Pavilion lamps, 2007, by Olafur Eliasson. Photograph by Simon de Pury

SDP: I heard that you have a winter birthday.

OE: Yes, the 15 February.

SDP: So that makes you Aquarius. Do you follow astrology?

OE: No, I don’t. It’s remarkable that everything always fits. It’s a little bit like fortune cookies. It’s always nice… it’s like: you’re going to meet a friend next week. That cannot be wrong. But I think the question is whether we have room in our life for matters that don’t really fit into Western science.

Read more: Interview with Claire Ferrini of Astrea London

I think Western science falls short of providing a safe future. You could refer to indigenous knowledge, for example, or knowledge about trees, the forest, the cyclical nature of weather and seasons, and how to treat nature and so on. It is remarkable to observe that these knowledges are considered absolutely non- functional or non-important by the rationalised or pragmatised minds of Western society.

And it turns out that there is a lot of insight into happiness, success and health that indigenous knowledge addresses. The trees are not as simple as we humans thought they were. And this gives us a great opportunity. When we see a tree, instead of saying, “Oh, there is a tree, what can I use that for? Can I make money with it?”, we can become crucially aware that if we indeed keep exploiting or extracting nature, we are going to ruin our own livelihood, the wellbeing of the planet.

The first set of designs for the LUX logo by Olafur Eliasson

SDP: I recently saw a Belgian businessman who is based in Brazil. He was discussing a project with an Amazonian gentleman who told him: listen, I first need to consult the trees. Once the trees gave a positive feedback, they were able to kick off their project.

One of the most fascinating experiences I’ve ever had is when I attended the annual Summer Nights gala you curated for the Fondation Beyeler. You staged an incredible environment just for that one night and your sister provided amazing food.

When we entered the room where the dinner was to take place, everything was in black and white. We suddenly experienced the world as if we were colourblind. The weirdest thing was eating food when it’s only black and white. You got up and started to give a speech, you pressed a trigger and colour reappeared as by a miracle! I have no clue how you pulled that off.

The playful evolution of Olafur Eliasson’s LUX logo designs

OE: Yes. White light, like sunlight, is the spectrum of all the colours of the rainbow. If the white light missed a colour in it, then it would miss in the rainbow. We know Newton’s lens with the prism [where white light enters the prism and emerges on another side separated into the colours of the rainbow].

White light is the visible area of the electromagnetic spectrum. Each colour has a special wavelength, measured in, I think you call it a nanometre. This is how light works, right? There is a yellow light in the yellow spectrum that is 100 per cent monochromatic. In our eyes, we have what are called receptors for light: we have blue, red and green. We actually don’t have yellow because the mix of red and green produces yellow.

Read more: 180 years of history with Penfolds

If you have this monochromatic yellow light and there’s no other white light, you are, in fact, only seeing a black and white image. Humans are capable of seeing more grey tones than colour tones. That’s why a black-and-white photo by Ansel Adams can sometimes look more real than the same photo in colour.

So you realise that our eyes really influence our brain to interpret visual information – say the food on your plate. The vegetable, you thought, is green because it appears to be in the shape of an asparagus. But actually it could be an orange carrot. This means that I already have a predetermined opinion about what I’m looking at and that influences what I’m looking at. Perhaps this is why we have a hard time changing our mind. It is what the brain tells us we are seeing. That’s interesting, because it suddenly throws up that reality is relative. For me, it shows how you are the author of your own responsibility with regards to what and how and why you see. You can choose to change your view.

The final Olafur Eliasson design for the LUX logo, as seen on the cover of our Winter 2025 issue

SDP: At the Summer Nights gala, we all had under our seat a Little Sun. Can tell us about it?

OE: Occasionally, I have organised events using a little handheld solar lantern called Little Sun. It’s a handheld little power station, which has a solar panel, strong and qualitative. The Little Sun project was to advocate and build awareness around sustainable energy. So it also has that little educational offering to have confidence in solar panels. Because 15 years ago, when we were testing the very first slides, some people would say, well, I don’t believe in solar panels. Now everyone knows what a solar panel is. We have delivered one million off-grid lanterns in sub-Saharan Africa. A large amount of our lamps – I believe one-third – are distributed at no cost in places where there is no economical infrastructure, such as refugee camps. My co-founder of Little Sun, Frederik Ottesen, has now for many years lived in Zambia to build this.

SDP: When Sam Keller, Director of Fondation Beyeler, introduced you that night, he said, “Olafur Eliasson is a 21st-century Leonardo da Vinci.” In your practice as an artist, an activist, an environmentalist – in your multiple activities, who do you measure yourself with?

The complete sphere lamp, 2015, by Olafur Eliasson. An open woven basket afixed to a circular mirror that creates a ‘complete sphere’

OE: I am really grateful for what I have been doing. My studio in Berlin has a 30-year anniversary this year and I’ve been very focused on how to give back to younger artists, their conditions and teaching at art school. I have my amazing studio team; I have the same two gallerists that I started with: Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider here in Berlin, and Tanya Bonakdar in New York. I admire people like I admire the jellyfish for its easygoing way of swimming. I never was very focused on competition or the idea of the heroic act.

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I am momentarily very inspired by the structural language specialist, the late Marshall Rosenberg. I’ve thrown myself into quite an intense study of this founder of nonviolent communication. It is about speaking and acting without inflicting judgment or threatening people you have disagreements with. I think art can address, not just the feelings that people bring to the room, but also their needs. There is much less likely to be a conflict or a polarisation, if we can state our needs fundamentally.

Needs can be very personal: we want to have a life, we want to be acknowledged, we want to be healthy, we want an education, and so on. I have a need for silence, because I get anxious if I don’t have silence.

A portrait of Olafur Eliasson by Jonathan Newhouse, for LUX magazine

SDP: One of the reasons I’ve always loved art is that art is one thing that can bring us closer together. To hear you speak now about nonviolent communication is riveting. I didn’t realise that this was also part of your focus.

OE: It’s a recent development. I keep finding out that the world is quite amazing. I remain humble and grateful for the many opportunities and in particular for the incredible career I’ve had. And there are many, many collectors and artists and friends and gallerists and museums who have believed in me.

Read more: Why preventative healthcare is essential 

SDP: It’s extraordinary to realise that your career already spans 30 years. Your list of achievements is phenomenal. What are your dreams going forward?

OE: Klee did this Angelus Novus, of the angel that faces the past and the wisdom of the past, but, in fact, flies backwards into the future. That was the kind of conservative idea of what is a good life. You learn from the successes of the past. The late philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour said that, considering the fact that modernity created the climate crisis, we actually can maybe conclude the past wasn’t quite as successful as we thought. The ground is trembling, it is collapsing right underneath our feet. I hope to have the courage to keep reinventing myself. And my biggest wish is that people still want to, and consider that relevant.

‘Shadows travelling on the sea of the day’, 2022, by Olafur Eliasson, installation view, Northern Heritage sites, Doha, from a group exhibition for Qatar Museums’ Qatar Creates, 2022

I just looked at a cartoon where a small dragon sits on the back of the panda, and the dragon asks the panda: what do you like the most, the path, the journey, or the destination? The process or the goal? My generation grew up with these questions. We said it was about the process and not the destination. The panda says, it’s the company. It illustrates the fact that we are, more often than we think, stuck in our own paradigm, and that prevents us from seeing things anew. That’s why I also named my recent show in Tokyo “Sometimes the river is the bridge”.

Hope alone is not going to change much. I believe you need to take action yourself, to get out and do it; to not only look at the horizon, but down and around, and learn from those you disagree with, find mutual company and make a movement. Then you can create change.

SDP: I always look at artists as mediums, as I feel that artists see things we don’t see yet. Artists, on the whole, are directed to the future. I feel all your activities are directed towards the future. It’s so interesting with what you said about hope. One always says hope is what dies last.

Eliasson with his 2007 ‘The Serpentine Pavilion lamps’, 2024. Photograph by Simon de Pury

OE: I think that in many ways it is also about love, to admit we all have a need for love. Maybe we need a care economy that would cater for caring for future life on this planet. There are some companies that aspire to make nature the chair of the board. There is a lot of legislative work being done by grassroots organisations, such as the charity ClientEarth, founded by James Thornton. It represented the air of London by suing the UK government for having too many pollutants. It’s a famous case. There are many countries where rights of personhood are becoming part of the legislation. Non-humans, such as mountains or rivers, have rights of personhood to protect against human intervention. I like this idea that we humans are not so exceptional any more. For one project called “Future Assembly”, I worked with others to propose that the Human Rights Charter is rewritten so that every part of the world should have a seat at the table: animals, the sky, the ocean – they should speak up for their rights.

Breathing earth sphere by Olafur Eliasson is a permanent public artwork on Docho island, South Korea, created specifically for the island’s volcanic topography, from 13 Nov 2024; “Olafur Eliasson: your curious journey” is at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 7 Dec 2024- 24 Mar 2025; aucklandartgallery.com

Olafur Eliasson Studio

Alice Audouin at the Art of Change 21 office

The Paris-based polymath has spent nearly 20 years enabling an ecosystem in which art and environmental concerns meet in meaningful and magical ways. Alice Audouin tells LUX about supporting a new generation of artists who invite us to consider nature via work of intense imagination. Interview by Anne-Pierre d’Albis Ganem

LUX: How would you describe yourself?
Alice Audouin: I work in contemporary art and sustainability as a curator and consultant. I’m also chair and founder of the not-for-profit organisation, Art of Change 21, which supports emerging eco-conscious artists via exhibitions and prizes. We bring artists to each COP conference; for COP26 in Glasgow, 2021, John Gerrard created Flare, about the ocean burning.

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LUX: What are you up to as a curator?
AA: In September 2022, I curated an exhibition in Brussels at the Patinoire Royale Galerie Valérie Bach, connecting art and environmental issues, and a major show of Lucy + Jorge Orta, marking their 30-year anniversary. My last show was ‘Biocenosis 21’ in Marseille. We showed 14 global artists at the world’s biggest biodiversity meeting.

Views of ‘Novacène’, Lille, 2022

LUX: And there is the superbly titled ‘Novacène’.
AA: Novacene is a book by the late James Lovelock, the scientist who proposed the Gaia hypothesis, which was the first time scientists had said Earth is a kind of living creature. We were inspired by his predicted utopia of the Novacene, a new era of cooperation between nature and human, aided by technology. It follows the current geological era, the Anthropocene, during which human activity has changed the climate. We have created a group exhibition that runs till 2 October at the Gare Saint Sauveur, Lille. Our 20 artists include Julian Charrière, Otobong Nkanga and Zheng Bo. ‘Novacène’ looks at ideas in technology, interspecies relationships, energy and agriculture – a kind of new world I designed with my co-creator, Jean-Max Colard.

LUX: You also contributed to Art Paris 2022.
AA: I was invited to be a guest curator on art and the environment. It was a chance to show how, for the new generation of artists, the eco crisis is not just a theme but part of their world.

LUX: Was this momentum there when you began?
AA: I started my work in 2004 at UNESCO with ‘The Artist as a Stakeholder’, so I’ve been doing this work for 18 years. When I began I had 100 artists and it was difficult to find artists who considered global or environmental issues, but now I have 2,500 artists in my database. I was in a position to witness change, which I think came to the art market maybe five years ago.

Alice Audouin with curator Alfred Pacquement at the Art Paris Art Fair, 2022

LUX: What is the artist’s role in the eco crisis?
AA: I don’t like to say artists should have a role. Their role is to be artists. But many conceptual artists, or artists who deal with their epoch, will cross environmental issues. Of these, many like to bring awareness, even solutions. Lucy + Jorge Orta purified water in Venice, pushing the idea of art with pieces that propose solutions. When they sell a drawing about the Amazon, the collector receives a certificate of a kind of moral ownership of 1sq m of forest. So they consider biodiversity as well as buying a drawing.

LUX: The artists involve people.
AA: Helping us think about our era – how we consume, our relation with time, resources, values, geopolitics – is very big now. Noémie Goudal works with paleoclimatology and proposes we reconnect our short individual time on Earth with long geological time. That’s important, because her art is also one solution to our relationship with nature.

LUX: Should artists not use plastic?
AA: We will see a revolution in materials. Tomás Saraceno, Gary Hume and our patron Olafur Eliasson are finding solutions to making – and moving – art. In-situ production is growing, too. For ‘Novacène’, two artists in Asia with complex installations gave us guidelines and we made them by distance. But I want to add caveats: if we over-reduce the means of artists’ production we will just have dead wood from a forest. If you say concrete is bad let’s drop it, you lose works. So we are in a transition period, as we look for green alternatives.

Views of ‘Novacène’, Lille, 2022

LUX: Tell us about biomimicry.
AA: It’s the idea nature provides and inspires. New art materials, such as mycelium mushrooms and algae, come from biomimicry. Chloé Jeanne, a laureate of the 2021 art prize I did with Ruinart, creates eco materials that are a kind of living creature. It involves the idea of care that, again, a collector continues. Eco design further explores how to create not only from the living but with the living. Tomás Saraceno’s Hybrid Web sculptures, for example, are co-created with spiders; Olafur Eliasson talks of interconnection. Many artists’ utopia now is not to work alone and compete, but to be together to create and cooperate.

Read more: Artist Precious Okoyomon on Nature & Creativity 

LUX: When did your interest begin?
AA: I was far from nature as a child, and I studied art history and interned at a gallery. But then I studied environmental economics, after which I was hired by a bank for a sustainability project. They talked of stakeholders, and I thought why don’t you talk of artists as such? I knew climate change was huge and I believed it would manifest in contemporary art. And it did.

Find out more: artofchange21.com

This article first appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2022/23 issue of LUX

Beauty, Olafur Eliasson (1993)

Standing in front of Olafur Eliasson’s Beauty, a shimmering mist suspended by light, is both a grounding and unsettling experience. While the serenity of a rainbow is amplified when viewed in focus, the presentation of this phenomena in isolation provokes an eerie sense of time frozen. Similarly, Moss Wall, the 20m wide mass of breathing Scandinavian reindeer moss, offers a magnified impression of its intricate and abundant surface. However, its preservation around wire mesh in the white cube space of a gallery is a sombering reminder of the fragility of the natural world. This exploration of time, atmosphere and nature is at the core of Eliasson’s work, along with an unwavering determination to protect the planet. He returns to the Tate Modern with his retrospective In Real Life following Ice Watch at the end of last year, which saw 24 blocks of Greenland ice melting in the London winter sun.

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Din blinde passager, Olafur Eliasson (2010). Photo by Anders Sune Berg

However, climate change, as the show demonstrates, isn’t Eliasson‘s sole preoccupation. The Danish-Icelandic artist is also fascinated by manipulating perspective. One whole room is dedicated to his kaleidoscopes, whilst In your uncertain shadow uses colourful beams of light to multiply the viewer’s silhouette in a huge projection against the gallery wall.

Big Bang Fountain, Olafur Eliasson

In perhaps his most powerful piece, Din blinde passager visitors enter a 39 metre passageway filled with dense, luminescent fog. With an inability to navigate visually, you become intensely aware of the other senses: the damp air on your skin, the sweet taste of vaporised food colouring and the sound of disembodied voices. You emerge exhilarated by the shared sensory experience and with a renewed focus on your body. It is in moments like these that Eliasson’s work is at its most powerful and transformative.

James Houston

Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life runs until 5 January 2020 at Tate Modern, London. To book tickets visit: tate.org.uk

‘Big Bang Fountain’ (2014) by Olafur Eliasson

The Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson famously brought the sun to Tate Modern. He is now returning for a major retrospective this summer. He talks art, cuisine, and slumber with Christopher Kanal

Olafur Eliasson

“I am incredibly happy about the whole thing,” Olafur Eliasson explains of the major retrospective of his work at Tate Modern in London that opens in July 2019. With ‘Olafur Eliasson: In real life’, the revered Danish- Icelandic artist returns to Tate 16 years after his ground-breaking The Weather Project famously filled the gallery’s Turbine Hall with the illusion of a sunset that was as eerie as it was sublime. Hazy memories of basking in the dazzling surreal sunlight mask the fact that The Weather Project has been one of the most critically acclaimed art installations so far this century and was experienced by over two million people.

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“We were lucky to warm up with the iceberg project,” Eliasson says with a gentle laugh. In December 2018 Eliasson staged a feat that could have come straight out of an Icelandic saga, but which had a very contemporary and urgent environmental message. The Scandinavian artist hauled centuries-old icebergs from Greenland to the banks of the river Thames to demonstrate the effects of climate change. Twenty-four icebergs, originally from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in south-western Greenland, and weighing up to six tonnes each, were placed in a circle outside Tate Modern and another six were put on display in the City of London as part of Ice Watch, a collaboration with award-winning Greenlandic geologist Minik Rosing. People gawped at, touched and even tasted the ice. “I’ve been studying behavioural psychology, and looking into the consequences of experience,” says the artist. “What does it mean to experience something? Does it change you or not change you?” When Ice Watch London debuted, Eliasson and Rosing pointed out the sobering statistic that 10,000 blocks of ice such as these are falling from the ice sheet every single second.

‘Beauty’ (1993) at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2015

‘Ice Watch’ (2018) by Eliasson and Minik Rosing, outside Tate Modern, London

Of course, Eliasson is not just celebrated for The Weather Project and icebergs. His varied works span not just temporary public art projects such as The New York City Waterfalls (2008) and large civic projects, such as the design of the façade of the Harpa concert hall and conference centre in Reykjavík (2013), but also small art projects and social enterprise endeavours. For Glacial Currents (2018) Eliasson created a group of watercolours produced using ancient glacial ice fished from the sea off Greenland. The ice was placed atop thin washes of colour on paper. As the ice gradually melted it displaced the pigment to produce extraordinary shades.

The studio’s Little Sun project, meanwhile, provides clean, affordable solar energy and light through a simply designed LED solar-powered lamp. “It brought me back to being a student,” he says of envisaging the design. “This is of course the greatest thing that you are not in fact getting older but you are getting younger.” The Little Sun lamp, which was launched in 2012, produces up to five hours of bright light. Over half a million lamps have been distributed to off-grid communities in 10 African countries.

Read more: Why you should be checking into L’Andana in Tuscany this month

The prolific 52-year-old artist is also an avowed foodie. So much so, that his Berlin studio has a professional kitchen run by his younger sister Victoria Eliasdottir. “This experimental kitchen is very much part of the life of the studio where dining together and sharing ideas has become enormously important for us,” he says. “The food in the studio is more family style where we put the pots on the table and we eat out of them,” he says, adding, “It’s not French service.” In late summer 2018, the siblings opened Studio Olafur Eliasson (SOE) Kitchen 101, a temporary restaurant/gallery by Reykjavík’s harbour and it became a hugely popular hangout. “Really great food always has a frictional element because it reminds you of all the not-so-great food you have eaten,” Eliasson says. “Good food is always on a trajectory and a journey. A great cook shapes a taste just as an artist shapes a sculpture. In that way great cooking is a very sensual, alchemic activity.”

Façade of Harpa Reykjavík Concert Hall and Conference Centre (2005–11)

Eliasson’s studio is in a former brewery and chocolate factory in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, an area that was once part of the city’s Soviet Sector during the days of the German Democratic Republic and a haunt of intellectuals, artists and East Germany’s gay community. Eliasson splits his time between Berlin and Copenhagen, where his art historian wife, Marianne Krogh Jensen lives with the two children they adopted from Ethiopia. The huge four-storey studio is home to a collective of around 80 artists, architects, engineers, developers and researchers. Each floor is a distinct hive of creative activity. Eliasson is certainly not the first artist to run a collective. Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York springs to mind, but Eliasson and his studio work very much as a collaborative team – he likes to call it ‘The Lab’. He is, however, no ringmaster: “I have always insisted on an open and transparent studio. There is no mystical, magical authenticity idea in keeping me as a kind of mythical figure.”

One of Eliasson’s most celebrated designs involved a collaboration with Copenhagen- based architectural firm Henning Larsen and Icelandic studio Batteríið Architects. Inspired by basalt crystals found in the geology of the dramatic Icelandic landscape, Eliasson’s glass façade design for the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík scattered reflections of the surrounding harbour, the fluid sky above and the looming Mount Esja across the bay. By night Harpa is a glittering spectacle of light. The building is in a constant flux of visual metamorphosis, which constantly alters perceptions. No one minute is the same. “The object is not necessarily the most interesting part about art, says Eliasson. “It is what the object does to me when I look at it or engage in it that is actually interesting. You are somehow provoked into a more negotiating role because you think, ‘What am I looking at?’ Then you are also more likely to enquire, ‘Well, what does looking actually mean and why am I seeing things the way I see it?’”

‘Waterfall’ (2016) at the Palace of Versailles

Eliasson was born in Copenhagen but returned often to Iceland after his parents separated when he was eight. His father was a cook on fishing boats as well as an artist, his mother a seamstress. Growing up in Scandinavia, the varying light, storm winds, bible-black winter nights, crystalline ice and vibrant norðurljós (northern lights) all infused Eliasson’s imagination. During the long summer holidays of his youth, Eliasson returned to Iceland to spend time with his parents and grandparents. The Icelandic landscape has been a lasting source of inspiration to him, particularly in its unique power to challenge how as an artist you interpret place and space through its beautiful yet unfamiliar and primal character. Eliasson tells me he likes to sit in his Reykjavík studio for inspiration because of the extraordinary quality of light in Iceland due to the island’s high latitude. As a boy he recalls that during the oil crisis of the 1970s, the Icelandic government used to switch the power off at 8pm to save energy, announcing the blackout by ringing the church bells. Eliasson fondly remembers the long, haunting twilights of dense colours and long shadows that were the only source of light.

‘Umschreibung’ (2004) at KPMG Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft, Munich

At 15 Eliasson had his first solo show, of landscape drawings in Denmark. “My father was an artist who influenced me and both my mother and him were more focused on me feeling successful with what I did,” he reflects. “When I did crazy doodles, they would say, ‘This is a great drawing’ instead of ‘This is not a house’. My father would say, ‘Why don’t you just fill in the blanks and it may end up being a dog or cat?’ I realise now that this was not so bad because it gave me the confidence that something abstract actually had the potential of becoming meaningful. This is something I have carried throughout my life.” After studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Eliasson moved to New York and worked for the Canadian minimalist artist Christian Eckart in Brooklyn. In the mid 1990s, he moved to Berlin, then a new cultural frontier following the fall of the Wall.

Read more: 6 Questions with renowned British art collector Frank Cohen

During the financial crisis Eliasson had an idea that he could save the Icelandic economy by buying all the grey sheep running around the country. Grey sheep are less popular than black or white sheep with farmers as they are harder to spot in the autumn, when they are rounded up and brought down from high mountain pastures where the grey sheep are indistinguishable from the rocks and the ground. “As an idea, a grey sheep is indecisive, it is a making-your-mind-up-as-you-go kind of sheep,” he says, with a bit of mischief. Eliasson’s plan was to farm these sheep in the harsher northern fjords where they would graze on wild berries and grasses. “The southern sheep are generally grass-fed sheep fattened up like turkeys in Kentucky,” he points out. “The texture of the wilder sheep meat is a lot darker, like deer.” Eliasson reveals he envisaged making his own version of Icelandic blóðmör blood sausage but with a North African twist, adding dates, onions, raisins and truffle oil. “People thought I was insane,” he says. “I guess Icelanders are not so much into North African food considering the history of the Tyrkjaránið pirate raids by the Barbary corsairs on the Vestmannaeyjar [a small archipelago off the south coast of Iceland] in 1627. I realised that I had probably contributed to the financial crisis rather than saved it but I tell you this sausage was amazing!”

‘The Weather Project’ (2003) at Tate Modern, London.

Amongst the sketches, models and large collection of vintage light bulbs in Eliasson’s studio there is an archery target. For inspiration, the artist will often pick up a bow and shoot an arrow into it. A lucky bulls-eye indicates a ‘yes’. It reveals Eliasson’s particular approach to his work. “I love supporting the people around me who I believe in and trust,” he says. “I learn so much from them, so it is a nice exchange. It’s a great luxury to be working with chefs, scientists or politicians. As long as I don’t start to cook or make science. I get stressed when I boil an egg.”

Answering the call

“This is a kind of profession you end up in,” says 29-year-old Victoría Elíasdóttir, who Condé Nast Traveller hailed in 2016 as one of the ‘10 Young Chefs to Watch’. “I kind of did,” she adds but then adds, “No, I kind of didn’t.”

Born in Denmark but raised in Iceland from infancy, Elíasdóttir grew up with food. After travelling around South America in 2007, she returned to Iceland and went to college. “Society said that being a chef was bad for your body, it’s not family friendly, you drink a lot and do drugs,” she says. “I tried graphic design and psychology. I started all these things but I always ended up talking about food, talking to my classmates and teachers about what I cooked yesterday, what I was going to cook tomorrow. In the end one of my classmates said ‘Why don’t you just give in?’”

‘Your Spiral View’ (2002), installation view at Fondation Beyeler, Basel

Elíasdóttir went to chef school in Reykjavík and initially found it tough: “My initial experience of being a chef was not very encouraging. On the other hand, I have always been drawn to things that kick up the adrenaline in a way.” After graduation she worked as head chef in a small summer hotel in southern Iceland, an idyllic place by a lake filled with wild trout and which grew its own tomatoes and cucumbers. There followed a stint at Chez Panisse in California under the eyes of culinary visionary Alice Waters before ending up in Berlin and helping run her big brother’s studio kitchen.

In 2015 she opened Dottír, a temporary restaurant in Berlin’s Mitte that occupied a building that had been a Stasi surveillance centre. It was a hit, with inventive dishes such as beet-infused salmon served raw and North Sea cod with Jerusalem artichoke cake, creamy sauce and trout roe. “Beetroot has been something that has been with me from as early as I can remember,” Elíasdóttir enthuses. “When I was child my mother used to serve it to me on a piece of rye bread with liver paté.” She also has a fondness for lakkrís (liquorice) and uses it when she can.

Elíasdóttir also caters for high-end corporate events. She recently created a seven-course vegetarian menu for Mercedes-Benz. “Everyone was a bit sceptical but afterwards I had comments from these big men, used to lobster and meat dishes, saying, ‘I don’t feel like I missed anything!’”

Avoiding the tired New Nordic cuisine label, the heart of her cooking is avowedly rooted in Scandinavian gastronomy. Think simple fresh seafood, herbs and regional, seasonal produce. “We have great farmers here in Iceland,” explains Elíasdóttir.

Sci-fi by design

Acclaimed French director Claire Denis’s new film, the sci-fi drama High Life, boasts a spaceship designed by Olafur Eliasson. Denis, best known for her widely praised films including the existential Foreign Legion drama Beau Travail (1999) and avant-garde vampire story Trouble Every Day (2001), has made her first English language film also her first foray into science-fiction.

High Life stars Juliette Binoche and focuses on a group of miscreant astronauts on a mission to reach a black hole in search of an alternate energy source. Eliasson’s involvement is his first work for a feature film but his second collaboration with Denis – together they made short film Contact in 2014 that explored themes of black holes and abstraction. Denis and Eliasson’s mutual fascination for these phenomena is evident in High Life, a story that Denis has been nurturing for 15 years. High Life opens in spring 2019.

‘Olafur Eliasson: In real life’ is at Tate Modern, London from 11 July 2019 to 5 January 2020. For more information visit: tate.org.uk and olafureliasson.net

This article was originally published in the Summer 19 Issue.