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Olafur Eliasson: PRESENCE, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

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I’m so grateful to QAGOMA for the opportunity to attend the opening weekend of Olafur Eliasson’s new exhibition, PRESENCE, in Brisbane last week.

I got to meet Olafur and interview him in Berlin back in May for a feature for Art Guide Australia’s Nov-Dec issue (out now) and it was a true, true career highlight. An expansive, freewheeling conversation that covered art, politics, care, institutions, climate catastrophes, uncertainty, collaboration and curiosity.

His studio is a four-storey former brewery in Prenzlauer Berg with different departments, studios, labs, libraries and kitchens. You absolutely get a sense of the scale of his thinking and his ambition. Fast-forward to now and to get to experience the exhibition conceived and curated with such relentless tenderness by Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, is such a joy.

It’s full of invitations to wonder, to slow down, to be surprised and confused, to feel dis/embodied and unsteady and still. I think what I appreciate in the gentle spectacle of his work is that it’s not only an invitation for viewers to renegotiate their own understandings of space/place/time/light, it’s also a model for museums to re-think their positioning or understanding of museum visitors and how we could better invite our audiences to negotiate their own meaning of the work/world at hand.

Olafur Eliasson: PRESENCE

QAGOMA

Until 12 July 2026

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I live and work on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people and acknowledge their unbroken connection to this Country. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past and present, because this always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.