Olafur Eliasson Quotes
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Every city is always changing, on its own trajectory.
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It's hardly even noticeable that so many artists, designers and architects live here. It isn't reflected in the cityscape or in the museums. Many of the artists, for example, exhibit around the world, just not in Berlin.
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I can use the camera to make a place or landscape; the camera to a greater extent projects rather than takes in or reproduces. The camera, or, rather, the eye, produces the impression of the place: I as a photographer am not passively taking in; I am active as a subject generating the object.
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I've walked a lot in the mountains in Iceland. And as you come to a new valley, as you come to a new landscape, you have a certain view. If you stand still, the landscape doesn't necessarily tell you how big it is. It doesn't really tell you what you're looking at. The moment you start to move the mountain starts to move.
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I was in Beijing a month ago working on the smoke project in collaboration with an architect there, and I was asked very directly whether it was safe to breathe in the smoke. They did not have confidence in the museum not to use harmful smoke, and they certainly didn't have confidence that the city would protect them from harmful smoke.
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I myself have already spent a third of my life in Germany, first in Cologne and then, since 1994, in Berlin.
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It would be wrong to say that the city of Berlin is not regulated. What I think is more interesting is to what extent a city creates a sort of safe haven for its users, so that people feel confident that the city works on their behalf.
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In the past Berlin was much more radical and extreme and now it's becoming much more of a conventional European city.
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I see the artist as a participant, a co-producer of reality. I do not see the artist as a person who sits at a distance and evaluates.
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If I have the choice of traveling to Russia, India or New Zealand alone for a week for preliminary discussions or to spend that week with my family, I routinely choose my family.
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I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.
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I was interested in how we engage the world. How do we use our skin as our eyes? If you read a cityscape or a landscape with just your mind, and not your body, it becomes like a picture or representation, not something you really engage with.
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For the sake of sanity, the brain and the eyes keep things simple. But take away the sense of sight and suddenly things are not so simple.
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I am not opposed to the art market. I have lots of friends who are collectors. But the whole idea of the art market is complex. Sadly we have a situation where auction houses and secondary market dealers are creating a lot of confusion and unnecessary pollution.
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There are 1.3 billion people today who have no access to electricity. Many of them rely on kerosene lanterns for light, but kerosene is both expensive and hazardous to the health.
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I think an artist has the potential to investigate both form and content within one activity, to show that there can be coherence between form and values in our society, as in thinking about a city and building one.
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I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.
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Having an experience is taking part in the world. Taking part in the world is really about sharing responsibility.
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In many rural areas of the world, local communities use kerosene for indoor lighting, which leads to asthma, poor quality of light, and the desperate cycle of oil-based products that continually degrade the environment.
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Over the years, in making art, I have constantly explored issues dealing with space, time, light, and society. I am particularly interested in how the light of a space determines how we see that space and similarly, in how light and color are actually phenomena within us, within our own eyes.
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By bringing Little Sun to Tate Modern and the London Olympics, I hope to realise an art project for those who typically have no access to global events of this scale.
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I want to expose and evaluate the fact that the seeing and sensing process is a system that should not be taken for granted as natural - it's a cultivated means of reality production that, as a system, can be negotiated and changed.