Innen Stadt Außen, Blind Pavilion

“Innen Stadt Aussen,” or Inner City Out, is Olafur Eliasson’s first individual exhibition located in, but not limited to, the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The show is a comment on the relationship between art in the context of a museum and throughout the city. Mirrors are installed on the streets to reflect works on the inside, in an literal sense, and conceptually to mirror culture and the art living within it. They bring down the barriers between museum installation and living art. Architecture, space, time, and interaction are all prevalent themes in Eliasson’s work. 

The “Blind Pavillion” immerses the viewer in dense colors that fill the air as a tangible material might. Upon entering, the room is filled with a fog that lights reflect off of to create an effect of walking through a sea of color, almost dreamlike, and ‘blinding’ in nature but for the shadowy sillouhettes of those around you. The flood of vibrant colors forces the participant to let go of the need to search for recognizable sensory gauges and feel the solitary state he creates. Eliasson plays with the relationships between looking at art from a distance and being apart of the work. He says that in a room with nothing to look at, he concentrates on the ideas of “seeing yourself sensing, and sensing yourself seeing;” you have yourself to examine in the context of the environments he creates. 

http://berlin.unlike.net/event_occurrences/108650-Olafur-Eliasson-Innen-Stadt-Aussen

http://bombsite.com/issues/88/articles/2651