From 19 March to 28 October 2023, the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: The Curious Desert was held in two locations: an indoor version at the National Museum of Qatar in Doha, and an outdoor installation near the Al-Thakira Mangrove Forest where 12 temporary pavilions conceived as art labs were erected to carry out experiments with wind, water and sunlight.
The interior display at the museum featured works from different periods in the career of this Icelandic artist based in Berlin: expansive light installations, complex geometric models, photographic series, watercolours, optical devices, and an extensive map of the research areas that occupy the artist and his studio.
Empty carried out the production and assembly of the indoor exhibition, and designed the necessary structures to hang the works with the respective technical plans used to make the partitions and anchors for each piece. This involved building walls and ceilings, and installing drapery and carpets. Empty also collaborated in the installation of the works themselves, and hung the framed photographs that were displayed in one of the rooms.
In both versions of the exhibition, and through mainly interactive works that invite viewers to play an active role in creating experiences, Eliasson continued to explore human perceptions and physical phenomena like light (a medium for expressing spatio-temporal dimensions), which together with “materials” like water and ice highlight the relationships between the natural and the artificial, offering clues about how we experience our environment, and the ways in which we interact with it.
