Eye see you

Exploring the properties of light and the way humans experience it, Olafur Eliasson has engaged for decades with light as a medium and a subject of investigation. Eye see you invites viewers to see themselves in relation to the most ancestral force that keeps us alive—the sun—as a source of nourishment and energy, a potential ally, but also a potential threat in an era of climate crisis.

The installation consists of a “solar cooker”—a prefabricated mirror-polished bowl that uses solar radiation for cooking in hot climates—mounted on a tripod. A sodium lamp attached at its center emits a bright yellow monofrequency light. Two dichromatic glass discs installed in front of the lamp change color depending on the viewer’s position and movement. Eye see you critically juxtaposes the absolutism of the seeing subject as a fixed, one-eyed, and highly specified persona (eye) and the technological object’s reductive thingness, which, in the installation, refracts the human gaze.

“I am keen to make works that exist to be seen while also inviting reflections on how they are seen,” Eliasson comments.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Abundant Futures", C3A, Córdoba, 2022)