Imagine standing beneath a colossal, pulsating sun, its surface alive with what appears to be a thousand miniature atomic explosions. It’s both mesmerizing and unsettling, especially when it seems to mirror your every move. This is the experience Olafur Eliasson, the Icelandic-Danish artist, invites you into with his latest exhibition, Presence. But here’s where it gets controversial: Eliasson doesn’t just want you to marvel at his art—he wants it to challenge your perception of the world and your place in it. Is art truly capable of fostering collective action, or is it merely a mirror reflecting our inaction?
The exhibition, spanning Eliasson’s 30-year career, takes over the entire ground floor of the Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) in Meanjin/Brisbane. Among the highlights is Riverbed (2014), a room filled with 100 tonnes of sand, pebbles, and rock, which returns alongside immersive installations that manipulate light, color, and movement. Photographs documenting the climate crisis serve as stark reminders of our planet’s fragility. The centerpiece, Presence—the interactive sun—evokes Eliasson’s iconic 2003 installation, The Weather Project, which transformed Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall into a communal space where strangers found a shared sense of humanity, or what Eliasson calls “we-ness.”
During a conversation with Eliasson and curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, the artist revealed the sun’s deeper purpose: “When you move, it moves. It’s a reminder that your presence matters, that your actions have consequences.” Eliasson sees his audience as “active co-producers” of his work, a philosophy reflected in pieces like Your Negotiable Vulnerability Seen From Two Perspectives (2025), where polarized light shifts colors and perspectives as you move. It’s a metaphor for how we perceive the world—unique to each individual yet interconnected.
In Beauty (1993), a simple curtain of dripping water, illuminated just so, becomes a transcendent experience. It’s not magic, but it feels like it—a thin veil between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Stand in the right spot, and a rainbow appears, a fleeting moment of wonder.
Presence transforms the gallery into a labyrinth of surprises. Some rooms are dimly lit, requiring your eyes to adjust; others are blindingly bright, almost clinical. Eliasson’s upbringing in Denmark and Iceland shaped his fascination with primordial landscapes—places many locals took for granted but which he saw as awe-inspiring. His photographs of Iceland’s glaciers, taken two decades apart, starkly illustrate the impact of climate change, a reality Australia shares.
Riverbed, acquired by Goma after the 2019 Water exhibition, takes on new meaning here. Designed to disorient, it features a trickling stream cutting through rocks—a haunting reminder of what remains when glaciers vanish. Eliasson hopes his work will jolt us out of complacency. “The collapse is now,” he says. “It’s our inability to cope with the way the world is falling apart.”
And this is the part most people miss: Eliasson rejects the idea of nature inside a gallery as separate from the outside world. “There is no inside or outside,” he insists. “The gallery is part of the world. You don’t step into a void; you step in to see more clearly, to see what’s contaminated, politicized, and weaponized outside.”
Despite his despair, Eliasson calls himself a “prisoner of hope.” He draws inspiration from Indigenous philosophies that view nature as kin and movements granting legal rights to natural entities like rivers and mountains. “It’s comforting to know people can change how they see things,” he says. Presence doesn’t offer answers but fosters connectedness and possibility. In one interactive piece, visitors collaborate to build a dream city using 500,000 white Lego pieces, sparking conversations about sustainable futures.
Barlow, who spent two months with Eliasson’s studio team, admires their collaborative spirit. “Where am I blind? What can you see that I can’t?” Eliasson would ask her. This generosity defines his creative process, evident in our hour-long conversation—twice the allotted time. As we part, Eliasson smiles and exhales, a gesture he hopes visitors will carry with them. “This gallery, like Iceland, is a place where I can exhale, soften,” he says. “That softening is the currency of tomorrow. That tenderness is fierce. And that is presence.”
Olafur Eliasson: Presence runs at Goma until 12 July 2026. But the questions it raises—about art, agency, and our shared future—will linger long after. What do you think? Can art truly unite us to save the world, or is it just another reflection of our divided reality?
