The glacier melt series 1999/2019 2019

Olafur Eliasson has created many different photographic series in Iceland. These works are often exhibited as grids of images. He has created photographic series of ships, bridges, huts, shelters, lighthouses and hydro-electric facilities under construction. More often, however, they document the landscape itself: hot springs, volcanoes, fault lines, waterfalls, rivers, mossy valleys, caves, horizons, islands, stones, ice and glaciers.

The glacier melt series 1999/2019 2019 is iconic within Eliasson’s many photographic series. Twenty years after he created The glacier series in 1999, it became clear the landscape in Iceland was changing irrevocably. The glaciers he had photographed were in retreat.

The glacier melt series 1999/2019, displayed here in in a long line, like a horizon, reveals the impact of rising global temperatures on Iceland’s glaciers and our world more broadly. Eliasson has also created public art projects, such as Ice watch – 12 chunks of glacial sea ice arranged in a circle, suggesting the face of a clock – which emphasise this point. By transporting ice to the city centre, including at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, Eliasson brings climate change into the realm of daily experience. People came to see, touch and listen to the ice, pressing their cheeks against its coolness as it melted.