UNIS and Olafur Eliasson

The UNIS-building is quite interesting, consisting of two parts, an old building from the nineties or so, when UNIS was established, and a quite new one, finished in 2005. Personally I don´t like the exterior very much, but the inside is wonderful. The new part of the building is big and cosy at the same time - airy corridors and slanting walls, and a quiet atmosphere (the quietness may partly be due to the fact that noone wears shoes, as it´s a tradition in Longyearbyen to remove your shoes when you enter most buildings).

It´s difficult to introduce art into such a defined environment, I suppose, because there´s little of that on the walls (except for traditional prints in the corridors). But the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has made a piece that was presented earlier this week (actually, they called it a Public Inaugeration Ceremony. Whatever. It included champagne).




His installation consists of long pieces of glass(?) on the outside of the window, treated with a kind of foil or film that functions as a lens. A strong lightsource on the outside passes through the installation and is perceived as a spectre of colours on the inside. But it changes as you pass, so it has a nice interactive feel to it.

Up till now nobody has really noticed the installation (it´s been up for several weeks), because apparently there´s been some difficulties with the lighting. But they´ve definetely got it right now - it looked really nice, I think.

I only wonder what it will be like when the sun returns. The artist didn´t know himself, it seemed. The window faces north, so the only time the sun has approximately a similar angle on the installation is around midnight. When the building is empty.


It must be have been difficult introducing art into surroundings that look so amazing in themselves - the view towards Hiorthfjellet and the huge sky, and the architecture of the room in itself is hard to compete with. You could argue that the art-piece really is redundant.

But still, I like Eliasson´s art - I´ve never seen one of his works in real-life, but from the moment someone described his Weather Project with the gigantic "sun" in Tate Modern in London, I´ve been a fan.


He gave a talk about his ideas around the installation, about the relationship between light as we perceive it and real light, and how he wanted the installation to give associations to natural light-phenomena like the northern lights or a rainbow.

Listening to his talk gave me associations to being back at the art school in Bergen - I enjoyed it a lot! But I suppose I´ve become used to the confusing logic of art-production. I think, however, that a lot of the listeners were left more bewildered than enlightened...

Anyway - here´s his homepage. He´s a busy man.



PS: Let´s hope it doesn´t suffer the same destiny as a previous art-piece did, a sculpture made in 1995 by Paul Brand, that was removed quite brutally in 2005 when the new part of the building was planned, and then ended up on the tip on the mainland. I understand that it was supposed to transport water that would freeze and create an ice sculpture - but that it stopped working during the first winter, and never was repaired. The locals were not fond of it, and the whole incident is now treated as a joke. Too bad ...