Taking the Tate by storm: Olafur Eliasson immerses the audience in art

A major highlight of the exhibition will be Din blinde passager (Your blind passenger) 2010. This is a 39-metre-long tunnel filled with fog. You can see only 1.5 metres ahead of you, so become temporarily blinded and your other senses are heightened. Another highlight of the exhibition is a space called The Expanded Studio. Here, there are maquettes and pinboards that evoke the way in which Studio Olafur Eliasson works as well as films showing some of his projects in action – 'Little Sun', 'Green light', and 'Ice Watch' – as well as impressions of his architectural projects and of life in his studio. Every other Wednesday, there will be a link up with the studio showing daily life and a range of projects and activities taking place there. You can ask the studio a question via the hashtag #AskSOE and responses will be screened in this part of the exhibition.

Olafur represents a totally new model for an artist. His activities extend far beyond those of most artists working today. In any given period of time he might be, for example, taking commissions for architectural designs (through his architectural practice Studio Other Spaces), or designs for stage productions; organising support for his Little Sun social business, speaking at conferences and summits dedicated to art and its power to accomplish change, working on ideas for restaurant pop-ups, or meeting with leading thinkers in fields as diverse as food, neuroscience, and urban planning to talk about new ways of understanding the world that will, in turn, inform his artistic practice.

An important milestone in Eliasson’s artistic journey was the expanding of his practice beyond the art world, which happened around the time of his mid-career survey 'Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson', at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2007. His network already included architects, geometricians, lighting experts, chefs, choreographers, and others with whom he could research and collaborate on new projects. By the end of the 2000s, these relationships, and those with politicians and business people, became fundamental to the kind of work he was making and the spaces in which his work was shown. He began to occupy new platforms, reaching a much broader audience than before.

Tate has a long-standing relationship with Olafur Eliasson. In 2003, he became the youngest artist to realise the Unilever Commission for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with 'The Weather' project. This not only transformed the vast architectural space, it also inspired new ways of thinking about the environment as a social space and about the kind of twenty-first century museum that we could become. This thinking has had a lasting impact on the way in which artists taking on Turbine Hall commissions have approached their projects ever since. In 2012, Eliasson launched his social business Little Sun at Tate Modern, which sells solar-powered lamps in off-grid areas. A number of his works are also featured in Tate’s collection and it was the right time to welcome him back for his first major exhibition in the UK.