International transdisciplinary artist Ólafur Eliasson, a Danish-born artist with studios in Berlin and Copenhagen, believes perception plays a significant role in how the world is being shaped. His artwork includes installation art, painting, sculpture, photography, and film making. Fields of interest include nature, science, architecture, alternative art education, sustainable energy, climate change, mass displacement and migration. His interest in architecture highlights interdisciplinary and experimental building projects.

Collaborative work occurs daily in his four-story Berlin studio with ninety staff members, including architects, art historians, artisans, specialized technicians, programmers, researchers, archivists, geometer, administrators, and cooks. They work with him to experiment, develop, and produce artworks, installations, exhibitions, public works, and architecture, as well as archive and communicate his work digitally and in print. The studio behaves as a transdisciplinary organism in constant states of mutation. It was always a place where work was co-produced, and the administrative work was soft power. Every new project presents a whole new set of challenges, and flexibility is required to enhance collaborations.

In 2012, Eliasson collaborated with engineer Frederik Ottesen to develop Little Sun, which produces and distributes solar lamps for people with limited access to reliable energy—which is almost one quarter of the world’s population. Since distribution of millions of “suns” to children in Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Zambia, Ethiopia, and other African countries, their worlds have changed. They have added 138 million additional study hours, saved households $175 million in expenses and reduced CO2 emissions by 1 million metric tons. And they have access to tap water at school provided by solar water pumps. Little Sun has expanded their efforts to provide solar energy in the fields of health, agriculture, post harvesting processing, and humanitarian concerns with migration.

Eliasson is a powerful, highly regarded artist and activist focusing on renewable energy and climate action and art is the perfect vehicle to make the invisible visible. And it can build bridges to activate a percentage of the population to move in one direction—to get off the status quo. Joined with activism, art, used as language, adds a sense of nuance, humility, and variability. He has improved activism through work like Ice Watch, Symbiotic Seeing, The Weather Project, and Beauty.

Eliasson has collaborated with Sebastian Behmann to form Studio Other Spaces. SOS projects derive from a broad range of discourses that encompass art, architecture, and other fields. See below their work: Seeing City in Paris, Vertical Panorama in the California wine country, and Fjordenhus in Denmark.

Ólafur Elíasson said, “… before we act, we have an idea. But before the idea, there is a space—the space where the known and the unknown meet. It’s uncertain, unstructured, and open. This is where we realize that reality is relative—that we can change what is real—and to see a view of things to come.” To watch his studio at work creating new realities, see Brilliant Ideas #32 and Art 21: Berlin.

Netflix features Eliasson in The Art of Design.

To learn more about Eliasson, please see his website and his gallery.

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