At Aarhus Art Museum, Olafur Eliasson Is Getting His Own Library

Launching in Denmark in autumn next year, a new long-term partnership between ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and Olafur Eliasson is aiming to “extend the experience” of the Icelandic-Danish artist’s work beyond the museum and into the public sphere. 

Titled Olafur Eliasson × ARoS – Shared Futures, the partnership encompasses a major solo exhibition, the acquisition of a monumental installation piece, a public art installation, a postdoctoral research position and a publicly accessible Olafur Eliasson study space and library.

The latter will include a collection of books on Eliasson’s artistic production, alongside digital access to his web-based artwork and digital archive, Your uncertain archive. A digital catalogue of sorts, the records will allow visitors to browse and engage freely with the research and ideas behind the artist’s finished works.

For Eliasson, the collaboration aims to set a precedent: “to show that museums can offer depth and focus for engaging with an artist’s practice in a more detailed, granular way.” Shared Futures is, he said, “about exploring the diverse ways of looking at art and understanding how art acts within the larger world”.

Following five years of development, the initiative will launch at the Aarhus-based museum with a solo exhibition of Eliasson’s work titled Thin Ice. Alongside key works from recent decades, the show will feature new site-specific works engaging with questions of climate and ecology.

Renowned for landmark installations such as The Weather Project (2003) at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and Ice Watch (2014), which saw large blocks of ancient glacial ice installed in public spaces across European cities, Eliasson has long explored how art can turn visitors into active co-producers of a collective, immersive environment. 

Extending this commitment, Thin Ice will debut a site-specific installation of the same name. Spanning the museum’s entire ground floor, the new installation will recreate the sensation of walking on ice, asking visitors to consider their steps as they engage with the work—and, by extension, the consequences of their actions in an increasingly fragile time for the word’s climate.

Also on display at the exhibition will be Eliasson’s Presence (2025), which will be acquired as part of the partnership. Comprising a monumental hovering yellow sphere, the installation bathes its surroundings in monofrequency light, restricting visitor’s perception of colour to yellow, black and grey. 

In a statement announcing the partnership, ARoS’ director, Rebecca Matthews, said that Shared Futures is about more than “presenting new works of art”. It is about “creating opportunities for people to explore ideas, ask questions and engage with some of the challenges we face together”.

For this reason, ARoS will also launch a postdoctoral research position at Aarhus University, specifically dedicated to the scholarly study of Eliasson’s practice.