ARoS Art Museum Announces Long-Term Partnership with Olafur Eliasson

Five years in development, Olafur Eliasson × ARoS – Shared Futures brings together ARoS and Studio Olafur Eliasson to create new ways of experiencing, exploring and engaging with Eliasson’s art and the questions it raises.

Shared Futures builds on a longstanding and significant relationship between ARoS and Eliasson. It began in 2004 with Minding the World, Eliasson’s first exhibition at ARoS and his first solo exhibition in Denmark, which followed a defining period in his international career after representing Denmark at the Venice Biennale and presenting The Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2003. The partnership continued with the opening of Your rainbow panorama on ARoS’s rooftop in 2011, which has since become an internationally recognized symbol of Aarhus. Today, the museum holds nine of his works and one of Europe’s largest collection of his installations. Unusual in its breadth, this relationship has encompassed exhibitions, the collection, architecture and a permanent artwork that has become inseparable from the public identity of the museum.

Olafur Eliasson said: “ARoS has supported my work in Denmark for many years, so it felt natural to make my online archive and library available there. For me, Shared Futures means that we share an interest in achieving something other than simply adding one and one together to get two – sometimes it can be eleven. The ambition is to show that museums can offer depth and focus for engaging with an artist’s practice in a more detailed, granular way. It is about exploring the diverse ways of looking at art and understanding how art acts within the larger world.”

Rebecca Matthews, Director of ARoS said: “Olafur Eliasson is one of the most visionary artists of our time. He has an extraordinary ability to make us see familiar things differently. Through light, space, and our own movement, his work makes us more aware of how we experience the world and how we relate to one another. We have seen the power of this at ARoS, where Your rainbow panorama has become part of how people encounter both the museum and the city. With Shared Futures, we want to take this relationship even further. Not simply by presenting new works of art, but by creating opportunities for people to explore ideas, ask questions and engage with some of the challenges we face together. That is the ambition behind Shared Futures: to make art an active part of how we understand the world we live in and the future we want to create together.”

Main Image: Credit: Olafur Eliasson, Presence, 2025