“Riverbed,” an installation by Olafur Eliasson is now on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Here is some information from the museum.
A surface of rocks covers the floors as the bed for a stream of water winding through the galleries. Eliasson’s work is about walking, but it also touches on more fundamental questions about how the architectural and institutional framework sets up a playing field for the users. What kind of behaviour does the museum invite and what conventions and habits do we associate with visiting a museum? What types of social encounters can happen at a museum like Louisiana? The work operates on this general level, simply in the way its scale transforms the existing space into an entirely different space and thus implicitly invites a different kind of behaviour.
