A close-up of a faceted geometric form glowing from within shows intersecting translucent panels that blend blue, yellow and orange light, held together by dark circular connectors.

Your negotiable vulnerability seen from two perspectives 2025

As we approach the circular lenses of Your negotiable vulnerability seen from two perspectives 2025, we see black become white, and coloured forms suddenly become invisible. Our movement is required to activate these shifts in how we perceive the work.

Most light we encounter, including sunlight, is unpolarised and travels to us as fluctuating electromagnetic waves. A polarising filter allows only waves of a specific orientation to pass. Layering such filters, each transparent on its own, produces surprising changes in colour and transparency as different wavelengths of light are blocked. Our movement is required to activate these shifts in how we perceive the work.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

A large circular frame holds a faceted geometric form glowing from within, its translucent panels shifting between blue, purple, yellow and pink around dark circular connectors, with three visitors standing nearby.

A blurred passer-by moves in front of a large circular frame containing a faceted geometric form glowing from within, its translucent panels blending blue, yellow and pink as two visitors observe from behind.

Three visitors stand before a circular frame holding a glowing geometric form that displays smooth colour gradients of blue, purple and pink across its translucent panels, joined by dark circular connectors.

Two silhouetted visitors stand in front of a circular frame containing a luminous oval shape with shifting blue, purple and pink tones created by overlapping polarising layers.

Room: ‘Perspectives and truths’

As we move, the flow of information which guides our perception of colour and light changes constantly. Olafur Eliasson amplifies this effect in these new artworks which use filters and other materials to modify the polarisation of light and challenge us to question the ‘truth’ of what we see. In our daily lives, polarised sunglasses use the same effect to reduce glare or horizontally reflected sunlight.

We most often use the word ‘polarisation’ to describe the social phenomenon of division within our community based on differences of opinion, increasing political extremes and defensiveness. Eliasson encourages another approach, using the polarisation of light to enable us to playfully move between one perspective and another. Can we shift from rigid oppositions to be more fluid, vulnerable and inclusive? To welcome surprising views? As we approach the circular lenses of Your negotiable vulnerability seen from two perspectives 2025, we see black become white, and coloured forms suddenly become invisible. Our movement is required to activate these shifts in how we perceive the work.

Eliasson invites us to explore different perspectives and understandings of the world. By focusing our attention on perception itself, his artworks demonstrate that how we see is based on our own anatomy, processes of perception and capacity for mental flexibility just as much as it is on the science of light passing through different materials. Similarly, Your truths 2025, utilises transparent materials in a long curtain and line of five circular polarising filters. Yet each time we look through the circular ‘windows’, we see the curtain in a different tonal spectrum.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Other work from ‘Perspectives and truths’:

Experience this work on the Sense Trail