Olafur Eliasson to Bring Fog Tunnel and Rainbow Mist to Tate Modern
In further news: calls to close tax loopholes for art-filled ‘freeports’; Elmgreen & Dragset memorial to gay Holocaust victims vandalized
In further news: calls to close tax loopholes for art-filled ‘freeports’; Elmgreen & Dragset memorial to gay Holocaust victims vandalized
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has shared further details around his upcoming summer retrospective at London’s Tate Modern: the show will feature a 45-metre fog-filled tunnel with his artwork Your blind passenger (2010), and a rainbow appearing across a fine mist in Beauty (1993). The exhibition will draw on more than 30 artworks spanning three decades of the artist’s career. The artist also plans to partner with the gallery’s kitchen to serve visitors the same organic, ethically-sourced meals dished up every day in his studio. Eliasson’s 2003 Weather Project, which flooded the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in artificial sunlight, became one of the gallery’s most acclaimed shows. Onlookers also got up to more than bathing in the light, the artist disclosed. ‘We had with the Weather Project opportunities which I would think could be describable as love and beyond,’ Eliasson said. Last December, Eliasson surrounded the Tate Modern with giant melting blocks of glacial ice from Greenland in a bid to confront the effects of climate change.
Pressure is building on the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, to close tax loopholes at a Luxembourg ‘freeport’. The high-security and tax-free holdings are used to house artworks and other valuable assets. Wolf Klinz, a German MEP, described Le Freeport Luxembourg as ‘fertile ground for money laundering and tax evasion’. The freeport allows clients to fly their assets over and trade them without being liable for customs or sales taxes. A Le Freeport spokesperson said that the institution was ‘compliant with the anti-money laundering law of Luxembourg and under 100% supervision of Luxembourg customs.’
A memorial to gay Holocaust victims, designed by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, has been vandalized in Berlin. The memorial – a cuboid of concrete with a window through which a video plays – situated in Berlin’s Tiergarten near the city’s Holocaust Museum, was splashed with black paint. Police are investigating what they suspect was a politically-motivated attack on the monument. The artists were commissioned to build the memorial in 2003.
Leading European museums, including the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, are teaming up to work on a EUR3.1 million project to transform the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. The EU-funded plan aims to revamp the Egyptian museum, with renewed attention on collection management and audience engagement. However, the Rosetta Stone – one of the British Museum’s most well-known and contentious holdings – will not return to Egypt as part of the project, the Art Newspaper reports.
In galleries and appointments news: New York’s Sean Kelly gallery now represents Belgian artist Kris Martin, with an exhibition planned this year; Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung has been appointed artistic director of the 12th edition of Sonsbeek in 2020, in Arnhem, the Netherlands; and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas has named Guillaume Kientz as its new curator of European art.
