I gasp as it comes into view: an enormous sun looming above, its surface roiling with what looks like thousands of tiny atomic explosions. It seems to notice me as well: when I stop, it stops too. It’s both awe-inspiring and unnerving.

In the mirrors around the glowing orb, I spot Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson – globally renowned for large-scale installations that challenge your sense of perception – posing for selfies with the crowd.

It’s the opening night of Presence, a major exhibition spanning Eliasson’s 30-year practice that occupies the entire ground floor of the Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) in Meanjin/Brisbane. His 2014 work Riverbed – a room filled with 100 tonnes of sand, river pebbles and rock – makes its return, alongside immersive works that play with light, colour and movement, and photographs spotlighting the climate crisis.

Presence (2025) by Olafur Eliasson. Photograph: Ágoston Horányi/Studio Olafur Eliasson

The sun – also titled Presence – brings to mind The Weather Project, Eliasson’s acclaimed 2003 installation for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Thatbecame a kind of public lounge room, where strangers found what Eliasson calls “we-ness”: a sense of shared humanity, which seems to be forming here, too.

I’d first heard about this sun a few days earlier, when I sat down with Eliasson and the exhibition’s curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow. “When you move, it moves. So the sun is asking you to notice that your presence makes a difference,” Eliasson told me. “It holds up in front of you the fact that your actions have consequences.”

Eliasson views the audience as “active co-producers” of his work. What you see depends on where you’re looking from; a reminder that we don’t all see the world the same way. One of two new works in the show that uses the polarisation of light, titled Your Negotiable Vulnerability Seen From Two Perspectives (2025), also shifts as you do. Black becomes white; vibrant colours flare.

Detail of Your Negotiable Vulnerability Seen From Two Perspectives (2025). Photograph: Ágoston Horanyi/Studio Olafur EliassonBeauty (1993). Photograph: Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio

In Beauty (1993), something as ordinary as dripping water becomes a transcendent experience. It’s not magic – just a curtain of tiny droplets and a light set at the right angle – but it feels like it. The water almost floats, like a thin veil between this world and another. Stand in the right place and a rainbow appears.

Presence turns the gallery into a kind of Tardis, each turn opening into something unexpected. Many rooms are dimly lit; one is so dark an attendant reminds me to give my eyes time to adjust. Others are so bright they feel antiseptic.

Firefly City (2025). Photograph: Jens Ziehe/Photographie

Eliasson grew up between Denmark and Iceland, attending school in Copenhagen and spending holidays with his grandparents in the Icelandic countryside. The primordial landscapes captivated him in ways many locals, who saw them every day, struggled to understand.

His photographs of Iceland anchor the exhibition in a reality that is both beautiful and confronting. Like Australia, Iceland is experiencing huge climatic changes. The* *Glacier Melt series – 30 pairs of photographs taken two decades apart, in 1999 and 2019 – shows a disturbing difference.

Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow and Olafur Eliasson stand in Riverbed (2014) at Goma. Photograph: Jason O’Brien/AAP

Riverbed, acquired by Goma following 2019’s Water exhibition, takes on a new meaning in this context. Deliberately designed to confuse the eye, it features a trickle of water snaking through the rocky landscape; it is what will remain when the glaciers are gone.

Eliasson hopes we can find the courage to “become un-numb” to this reality. “The collapse is now. The collapse is our inability to deal with the way it is collapsing,” he says.

He rejects the idea that nature created inside a gallery – like Riverbed – is fundamentally different to nature outside: “There is no outside and inside. There is only the world. The gallery is inside of what is outside. You don’t step into a gallery to disappear into the void. You go in to see more clearly; to see things which outside are contaminated and politicised and weaponised.”

He despairs for the world, but Eliasson ultimately calls himself a “prisoner of hope”. He speaks about Indigenous philosophies that view nature as kin, and the movement to grant legal “personhood” rights to natural features such as mountains, rivers and forests. He is heartened by these shifts away from the anthropocentric worldview: “It’s comforting to know people have the capacity to change how they see things.”

Eliasson’s The Cubic Structural Evolution Project. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Presence attempts to offer both awareness and agency – not by providing answers, but by fostering a sense of connectedness and possibility. Visitors can sit side by side to create a collective dream city using 500,000 pieces of white Lego, Eliasson’s 2004 work The Cubic Structural Evolution Project. “We’re thinking, how do we spark off each other, and dream, and make a city where energy, materials and creativity cycle in different ways?” explains Barlow, Qagoma’s head of international art.

As part of the planning process for Presence, Barlow spent two months with Studio Olafur Eliasson – a unique undertaking for both artist and curator. She admires the ecosystem of experimentation among the 90-odd team, which includes architects, craftsmen, historians and specialised technicians. Eliasson would ask Barlow: “Where am I blind? What can you see that I can’t?”

“It’s been a lot of fun,” Eliasson tells Barlow. “You take a perspective, then I can go behind you and take your perspective, and mine, and I can hold them up against each other and see the discrepancies.”

The generosity underpinning Eliasson’s creative philosophy is also evident in our conversation. We speak for more than an hour – double our allocated time – which is no small feat just two days out from opening. As we wrap, Eliasson smiles and exhales. It’s a physical expression of how he hopes people feel long after they leave Goma.

“This gallery, like Iceland, is a place where I can exhale. I don’t have to always be on my heels. I can soften,” he says. “That softening is the currency of tomorrow. That type of tenderness is actually fierce. And that is presence.”

Olafur Eliasson: Presence is at the Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) in Meanjin/Brisbane until 12 July 2026.