DIN BLINDE PASSAGER: Your Blind Passenger

Friday, April 15, 2011

Last week I visited the Arken Museum outside of Copenhagen, Denmark to experience one of the latest works by Berlin-based Olafur Eliasson, “Din blinde passager (your blind passenger)“. Moving through the lengthy hall was a captivating experience as myself and other participants wandered into a fog so thick we lost sight of our complete spatial surroundings and at moments even our own bodies.

Text from Arken:
As the final artist in the Utopia series of exhibitions Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) has developed the installation Din blinde passager (your blind passenger), (2010), a long tunnel constructed of plywood. Entering the tunnel, your body is immediately surrounded by thick fog. Visibility is just 1.5 metres, as we grope our way through the tunnel, trying to orient ourselves in relation to the space around us.

Consequently, Eliasson’s piece challenges the basic concept of visiting a museum to look at something. Here, we first see the reverse side of the work, and when we step inside we are enveloped in the work and become a physical part of it.

Eliasson’s works are often described as experiments and, indeed, Din blinde passager does contain an element of testing. Instead of presenting us with a vision, the work puts us in an unfamiliar situation. In his contribution below Eliasson links utopia to the moment between one second and the next, and to the possibility that emerges when our wandering through the fog opens up a new understanding of our collective and personal spaces. Olafur Eliasson himself says:

“For me Utopia is tied to our ‘now’, to the moment between one second and the next. It constitutes a potential that is actualized and transformed into reality; an opening where concepts such as subject and object, inside and outside, proximity and distance are thrown up in the air only to be defined anew. Our sense of orientation is challenged, and the coordinates of our spaces, collective and personal, have to be renegotiated. Mutability and motion lie at the core of Utopia.”

Olafur Eliasson – “Din blinde passager (your blind passenger)” (2010), Installation.
Exhibition image courtesy of Arken Museum, photographs of interior views and detail by Clare Ros.

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