Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey: Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia

Museum MACAN proudly presents Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey, an exhibition showcasing more than three decades of the Danish-Icelandic artist’s practice. This exhibition offers visitors a unique opportunity to engage with a selection of key works that trace the evolution of Eliasson’s explorations, including exclusive to Jakarta works that expand the exhibition’s interpretive breadth, which offer unique and fresh perspectives to the Indonesian edition. 

Eliasson’s work highlights how natural phenomena and objects hold their own form of agency, moving beyond traditional roles as subjects of observation. Through the use of elements, such as light, water, fog, and even invisible forces like magnetism, Eliasson creates immersive environments where forms, shadows, sensations, and rhythms come to life. The art is completed through the active engagement of the viewer, inviting viewers to renew their awareness and engage their senses. 

The exhibition invites visitors to pause and reconnect, not just with themselves, but with the museum and the world around them. Eliasson encourages us to see with fresh eyes, opening up possibilities for uncertainty to spark our curiosity and renew the way we experience. 

Olafur Eliasson said, “The artworks are only ever complete when you, the viewer, engage with them, with your curiosity. Being curious means being open to listening, to seeing the unexpected, to change. It requires us to take on different perspectives, as in the artwork Multiverses and futures (2017), on view here in Jakarta, where the kaleidoscopes offer you a range of unfamiliar, fragmentary views of your surroundings. These works, as with the entire exhibition, invite you to engage with all your senses, to re-examine your perceptions of yourself, the museum, and the world.” 

Eliasson’s work also reminds us that we are not separate from nature; instead as a part of vast, interconnected ecosystems where every element plays an essential role. 

At Museum MACAN, the journey is about embracing ecological awareness and celebrating diverse cultural perspectives. It’s a reminder of how small actions have a ripple effect to shape its ongoing story. Your curious journey offers a special opportunity to witness how nature communicates through their signs and signals. 

Venus Lau, Director, Museum MACAN, said, “we are honored to present Olafur Eliasson’s transformative exhibition Your curious journey to Jakarta, inviting visitors to engage deeply with nature, colors, lights, and elements that invite us to rethink our roles as humans within the ongoing process of worlding, perception, and environmental connection through his groundbreaking works. This exhibition exemplifies the powerful bon between art and ecological thinking that resonates across cultures, encouraging us to embrace our responsibilities, acknowledge our limits, and deepen our relationship with the nature world” 

Olafur Eliasson added, “The artworks I am showing in Your curious journey have covered great distances to arrive in Jakarta. They come from many locations and reflect diverse moments from the last three decades of my practice. They have their own tales, their own itineraries. Each bears the marks of its creation and the challenges that led it to assume the particular form in front of you. They carry within them a mixture of intentions, interpretations, and contexts, and they react to the specific conditions of the exhibition. Here, at MACAN, they come together in a new arrangement that is different from any before or after, including a number of artworks that have not been seen together in previous iterations of this traveling exhibition. 

You too will have travelled to get here. It may be a trip from just around the street corner or from across the globe. It may be the process you have gone through that made you curious to visit the exhibition. This may be the sum of your experiences or the result of a chance encounter. You bring your own associations to the artworks when you encounter them."

Images:

Installation view: Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey, Museum MACAN, Jakarta, 2025. Photo by Liandro Siringoringo.