Last week three exhibitions opened simultaneously at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv: “Your Emotional Future,” the first personal exhibition by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson to be held in Eastern Europe; “Blow-Up,” a personal project of Ukraine’s Arsen Savadov created within the framework of PAC-UA 2 art space, and “Collectible Platform: Circulation 2,” which includes selected works from earlier exhibits held at the center.
Clearly Eliasson’s exhibit was the central event of the new season. Sixteen works by him are presented on the art center’s three floors. Barring several exceptions, such as Beauty (1993) and The Room for One Colour (1997), most compositions are dated 2010-11, including some created specially for the PinchukArtCentre.
Eliasson’s works are intended to seem distinctly ephemeral. They often exist only here and now, like The Room for One Color, which is filled by uniform light of halogen lamps through which all the spectators seem to be immersed in a black and white film: just one turn of the switch, and the picture disappears; or Happiness, a narrow blue bar in a completely dark room: this crack allows one to observe the life of a UV soap bubble colony — it truly shows the happy non-existence of the image, which has no constant form, yet is completely restricted by it.
More tangible installations are also inherently outlandish — Your Disappearing Garden, a completely white large room, lined with shiny, black and razor-sharp fragments of obsidian, seems to be a 3D cast of some perilous dream. Your Tangible Future, yet another empty space with a metal ceiling which is similar to a giant distorting mirror, brings to mind the psychedelic image of “liquid sky.” In Your Blind Movement, the spectator’s attention is absorbed by an enfilade of rooms which is covered with a light mist that seems to transform into some new dense substance due to the effects of multi-colored backlight. The mesmerizing Water Pendulum shows a hose, suspended from the ceiling, that dances and sprinkles water amid the disco strobe flashes.
In general, “Your Emotional Future” is a classic example of optical art, which is mainly based on electric lighting and space transformations that occur through the interplay of light and shadow.
Speaking about his exhibition, Eliasson said: “When I’m working on projects like this one. I carefully consider which way the visitors would walk around the gallery, how their experiences with this or that work would influence their feelings when confronted with another one. This building has its own language; it was a hotel once, and this explains it having been built on a pleasant, homelike scale. I tried to build a dialogue with this special, comfortable and homely feeling, focusing on the extent to which visitors can see their own experiences in the context of the exhibition. This is an assessment of our experience’s essence... This exhibit takes you on a journey, almost like a walk in the garden, but this time this is a journey into the microcosm. It offers a variety of spatial ideas, but eventually, as with a book that had been read section by section, we get a complete story, a story about the environment and our earnest relationship with it.”
Commenting on the name of the exhibit, the artist stressed that “it is not enough to rely on the systems, dogmas, manifestos and political ideologies as tools of coexistence in this world. In the future, we must rely also on other things: compassion, sensitivity, empathy and the fundamental ideas of interaction between people.”
