Abstract

The spaces provided by art and itssensory aspects are the targets of this research. More specically, the focus is on art installations, whose peculiarities consistin how they play with architecture. It is notabout the galleries architecture or even thedesign of the exhibition, but the resultantspace of art architecture and visitant that provokes expanded space experiencescomprehension beyond the usual categories.The beginning is the comprehensionof art installations as temporary works thatinvolve the public through spaces created by the artist. According to Claire Bishop(2006), the installation creates a situation inwhich the viewer goes in physically and isapprehended as a singular totality. Instead ofthinking the viewer as a pair of eyes without body, it exalts the sensations, the haptic, thesmelt, the audition, so as the vision.Certain art installations proposequestions about the spatial experience.This text is delimitated by the productionof Olafur Eliasson (1967-...). To enter inEliasson´s installations means to experience a production of space as an eect that goesfar in perceptual eld to activate many other consequences and comprehensions.The multiple research developed byEliasson puts him in the limits of Art andScience, that tying also the philosophicalknowledge and his collaborators, as thecurator Daniel Birnbaum, and culminatesin experimentation in the spaces of theinstallations with the public participation.The analysis of Weather Project has beenchosen to exemplify the relations among the pieces of the artist. “This synthetic heliocentric cosmos is nodoubt the masterpiece of the year, activatingthe space and involving the observer, bothas perceptive subject and as a body among bodies. The installation rearms the Great Art can be popular”. (BIRNBAUM, 2003)Going deeply in Eliasson´s repertory islike making a net, where each point is a knotof intersection: an extended repertory sinceWiliam Turner paintings till BuckminsterFuller inventions. Working in the limit ofart and architecture is the target of this artistand by presenting Eliasson’s work since1990 an overview of space perception is being shaped along this research. These artinstallations are aiming the sensorial space, provoking the visitor’s senses to co-producean spatial experience.Looking back to the masterpiece andits repercussion is important identify thecharacteristics that make Weather Projectemblematic for 2000’s art which repeats inmany others Eliasson’s purposes. With thisis possible to structure the Eliasson’s piecesanalysis by the criteria of movement andlight, verifying elements as: scale, interior/exterior, light, color, self-observation andmeteorology. Amplifying more, this pieceanalysis shows other questions, amongthem: the museum as a questioning place, public engagement e the place of art insociety.Sharing ideas, collective living, co- participation and co-authory are trekkingthose road since 60’s. Eliasson makes itsconcepts in practice, insistently, in eachspace, where associates it to neurosciencediscoveries and to new social behaviors.This work aims to bring to academicdiscussion what is being produced andthought in artistic circles about space. It aimsto promote this meeting.