A DIFFETENT PERSPECTIVE ON WHOLENESS THROUGH
 ART, NATURE AND THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

What do we see when we look at a tree for a long time?


The longer we keep our gaze on it, the more the form that first appeared singular and whole begins to open up into its details. We start to notice the cracks in its trunk, the branches reaching toward the light, the surfaces left in shadow, the new growth at its tips and the parts beginning to dry.


We do not see the tree only in the light. We perceive it together with its darkness. One side of its trunk turns toward the sun while the other remains in shadow. Some branches begin to grow, while others break. Its roots descend into the darkness of the soil as its branches rise toward the sky.

All these contrasts do not divide the tree’s existence. Instead, they complete it. Life and death, growth and decay, movement and stillness make room for one another within the same form. What makes it a living being is not perfection or permanence, but its ability to carry all these different states within the same body.


Art seems to have understood this for centuries. In a painting, light needs shadow in order to become visible, one colour needs another beside it in order to reveal itself, and a composition needs empty space in order to breathe.


Perhaps beauty does not lie in one element prevailing over another, but in their ability to exist together without losing their differences.

THE BALANCE ART CREATES THROUGH CONTRASTS

Light and shadow. Emptiness and fullness. Transparency and opacity. Movement and stillness.


Some of the most powerful images in art are born not from similarity, but from carefully constructed contrasts. The tension within a composition is shaped less by its elements rejecting one another than by the relationship between them.


Negative space in a visual composition is not an unused or incomplete part of the work. On the contrary, it is an active space that allows form to become visible and the composition to breathe. Much like the silence between notes in music, or the pause between two movements in dance.

In Olafur Eliasson’s practice, this relationship is established not only within the work itself, but also between the work and the person looking at it. Working with light, colour, space and perception, Eliasson transforms the viewer from a passive observer standing before a finished object into part of an experience that is continually reconstructed through their own movement.


One of the most striking examples is Your rainbow panorama, which has stood on the rooftop of ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark, since 2011.


The circular walkway extends 360 degrees above the museum and is enclosed by glass surfaces following the colour spectrum. As you move through it, Aarhus, the sky and the horizon reappear through different colours. The structure remains fixed, yet the experience never does.

Is it the body that moves, or the city that changes? Does the colour transform, or does our way of seeing it?


It is no coincidence that Eliasson’s artwork archive associates Your rainbow panorama with concepts such as “shifting appearances” and “you only see things when you move.”


Rather than presenting the viewer with a single image, the work draws attention to how an image comes into being.


Colour, light, body and space become parts of the same perceptual experience.

There is also a current reason to reconsider this relationship in Aarhus today. Collection Favourites, which opened at ARoS on 12 September 2026, brings together works by artists including Olafur Eliasson who have played a role in shaping the museum’s history over the years. By returning to its own collection, the exhibition creates space for works encountered in the past to be seen again through the perspective of the present.


Perhaps the power of art does not always come from perfect harmony. Sometimes what makes us stop in front of a work is a tension that never fully resolves, yet remains in balance.


In Eliasson’s work, this tension exists not because one contrast eliminates the other, but because our gaze is able to move between them.

NATURE DOES NOT ELIMINATE CONTRASTS

Night and day. Birth and death. Storm and stillness. Roots descending into the earth and branches reaching toward the sky.

In nature, contrasts do not cancel one another out.


Night is not an absence standing in opposition to day, but another phase of the same cycle. Decay is not simply the point at which life ends, but the beginning of another transformation. Storm and stillness are less like two separate characters of nature than different intensities within the same rhythm.


Nature’s balance is not based on perfect symmetry. Organic forms are often irregular, changing and asymmetrical. Cracked bark, a fading leaf or a weathered stone is not a flaw in nature, but a record of its ongoing transformation.

In Eliasson’s practice, nature similarly stops being a fixed landscape. Light, water, mist, colour and air are not merely represented elements; they become materials that construct the experience itself.


This approach also makes the boundary between human and nature, or between the artificial and the natural, more permeable.

Although Your rainbow panorama is an entirely man-made architectural structure, the experience it creates depends on daylight, the sky, weather conditions, the changing view of the city and the movement of the visitor. The same corridor does not produce the same image at a different hour or beneath a different sky.


The work remains in place; the world changes. Even when the world appears unchanged, the body looking at it moves.

Perhaps one of the most fundamental contradictions in our relationship with nature lies here: while we try to fix, classify and define it, nature continues to change.


Rather than attempting to control this variability, Eliasson’s practice incorporates it into the experience. It invites the viewer to stop being an observer looking from the outside and become aware of the relationship they form with what they see.


Because nature does not take sides between opposites. It makes room for each of them within its own cycle.

THE CONTRASTS WITHIN US

A person can be strong and fragile, connected and alone, hopeful and anxious at the same time.


Our inner world is not a single, fixed or entirely consistent composition either. Our identity carries many layers at once, becoming visible at different moments and sometimes contradicting one another.

For this reason, defining a person only through the parts of themselves that are strong, courageous or good is like looking only at the illuminated surface of a portrait.

In Viviane Sassen’s images, which move between fashion and fine art photography, the human body stops being a fixed identity that can be easily read. Shadows obscure faces, parts of the body merge into one another, and the figure sometimes becomes less a person than an abstract, almost sculptural form.


The boundary between the real and the abstract, between what is visible and what remains hidden, is constantly shifting.


This approach becomes particularly apparent in Sassen’s 2014 series UMBRA. Taking its name from the Latin word for “shadow,” the series treats shadow as more than the absence of light. It becomes a metaphor for anxiety and desire, memories and expectations, imagination and illusion.

For Sassen, shadow gradually becomes more than a visual device. It opens onto the unseen parts of the self. Speaking about UMBRA, the artist describes turning to Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of the “shadow,” exploring the aspects of ourselves that remain hidden in the unconscious, the parts we do not want to show, fear or suppress.


The fact that the series is also connected to Sassen’s grieving process following the death of her father transforms the visual contrast between light and darkness into an exploration of a deeply personal inner world.

Here, shadow is no longer a dark region that needs to be eliminated. It becomes the other side that gives meaning to what is visible.

The body in Sassen’s photographs behaves in a similar way, at times revealing itself and at others withdrawing. Rather than offering the viewer a definitive identity or a completed story, it leaves a threshold where meaning can emerge.


Uncertainty is not a lack within the image, but the source of its poetic tension.

And perhaps this is precisely where the seemingly very different practices of Eliasson and Sassen begin to meet.


While Eliasson uses light to make us question the world we see outside ourselves, Sassen uses shadow to look toward the world that remains hidden within.


In one, the external world changes as the body moves through space. In the other, the body fragments between light and shadow, revealing that identity is never entirely singular or fixed.


In psychology, the ability to hold opposing emotions at the same time is described through the concept of ambivalence. Human experience often takes shape between two definitive states. We are neither only one thing nor entirely the other. Our identity is continually reconstructed through the relationship between its different parts.

Wholeness is not made only of the parts of ourselves we like to see. The parts we leave in shadow, find contradictory or have not yet been able to name are also part of our inner composition.


Perhaps the real question is not about constantly choosing one side.


Because every perspective that forces us to define ourselves through a single identity, thought or emotion eventually makes the opposite it excludes more visible.


What endures is not one contrast prevailing over the other, but a way of seeing that can hold both despite the tension between them, without needing to erase one in order to understand the other.


Because in nature, in art and in human experience, wholeness does not come from erasing differences. It comes from allowing them to make room for one another.






REFERENCES

Studio Olafur Eliasson. Your rainbow panorama, 2006–2011. 
Artwork Archive.

ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum. Olafur Eliasson: Your Rainbow Panorama. Exhibition Catalogue. Aarhus: ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2011.

ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum. Collection Favourites.
12 September 2026–29 August 2027. ARoS, Aarhus.

Sassen, Viviane. UMBRA. 2014. Commissioned by Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam. Viviane Sassen Official Archive.

Ammerlaan, Robbert. “Loss and Longing.” Interview with Viviane Sassen. See All This, September 2017. Viviane Sassen Official Archive