A silhouetted visitor stands before a large circular polarising filter that reveals layered translucent sheets in soft blue, green and yellow tones, with iridescent vertical strips in blue, pink and gold visible beside it.

Your truths 2025

Your truths 2025 utilises transparent materials in a long curtain and line of five circular polarising filters. Each time we look through the circular ‘windows’, we see the curtain in a different tonal spectrum.

For tens of thousands of years, navigational tools and environmental knowledge offered ways to manage the unknowns of a dark night, cloudy skies, unfamiliar seas and coastlines. Generations ago, the Norse developed an unusual navigational aid to support their voyages between Scandinavia, Europe, Iceland and all the way across the Atlantic. They used birefringence — the capacity of a material to polarise light, found in a crystal known as Iceland spar — to determine the direction of the sun, even on cloudy days.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

A person stands in front of three suspended circular polarising filters, each showing the translucent curtain behind them in shifting tones of yellow, blue, brown and iridescent multicolour, framed by hanging transparent sheets.

A close-up of a circular polarising filter reveals layered translucent sheets in bright yellow, blue, and dark iridescent colours, with a person nearby seen through the hanging transparent panels.

A wide gallery view shows five circular polarising filters suspended in a row before a long translucent curtain, each filter revealing a different colour spectrum ranging from muted greys to bright yellow, blue and rainbow tones.

Two visitors stand beside a series of suspended circular polarising filters that display varied colour bands – yellow, blue, grey and multicoloured – visible through layers of overlapping translucent curtain material.

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

Your truths 2025

Room: ‘Perspectives and truths’

Other work from ‘Perspectives and truths’:

Room: ‘Perspectives and truths’

Other work from ‘Perspectives and truths’: