Olafur Eliasson began his collection project with an artist’s newspaper which was sent to the members of our art society and the media in 2003. In the spring of 2004, the newspaper was used to realize a wall installation in the Kunsthaus bar, where it remained for some time.

In the summer of 2004, Olafur Eliasson's first collection project was followed by the first major exhibition of the internationally renowned Danish-Icelandic artist in Zug. Eliasson showed installations, a new light work, print series on Iceland and his spectacular model room, with more than two hundred fascinating study objects. An installation consisting of countless white Lego pieces provided visitors with a means of realizing their own ideas; they played and “worked” with all intensity. Eliasson’s project entitled The body as brain turned the museum into a laboratory for exploring the powers of perception. The large outdoor-interior installation, which connected the museum with nature and public space, was complemented by an associated light-water work and photographic series by the artist.

Olafur Eliasson strongly concerns himself with the erosion of nature by civilization, which also particularly characterizes Switzerland. Behind this lies the question of the relation between naturalness and artificiality, which he repeatedly and impressively poses through museum stagings of natural phenomena (Kunsthaus Bregenz, Tate Modern). He often works with the element of water. In Zug he was interested in the Burgbach brook, which flows around the Kunsthaus to the east and west. By means of a wooden trough about a hundred meters long, Eliasson created a connection between the stream and the Kunsthaus, so to speak. Water now flowed not only through the municipal park, around the city wall, over a road and through the Kunsthaus garden, but also right through the museum! For ecological reasons, a closed circuit was created (with pump and hoses). Culturally and historically, the work was reminiscent of traditional irrigation channels in the Alps.

The large outdoor-interior installation, which connected the museum with nature and public space, was complemented by an associated light-water work and photographic series by the artist.

The large-scale water installation realized by Olafur Eliasson for Kunsthaus Zug in November 2005 remained in place in modified form until October 29, 2006. A wooden trough two hundred metres in length conducted water from the nearby Burgbach through the Daheimpark and the Kunsthaus garden, and from there back to the brook. The trough was then decisively enlarged: It newly led to the neighboring Museum Burg and from there through the treetops along Burgbach Square, where, ultimately, a spiral tower (The water tower concert) five meters in height conducted the water back to the stream by way of twelve seesaws. The project was developed by the artist in close cooperation with Swiss partners.

Eliasson’s installation revolved around time as expressed by the element of water; it changed in the course of the seasons and was transformed in reaction to the changing needs of the museum.

The internationally successful Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson had been cooperating with Kunsthaus Zug since 2003 within the framework of Project: Collection. His radical outdoor water project was followed by a spectacular indoor installation in 2007/2008, likewise based on a natural element: Icelandic lava. Some sixty tons of this material covered the floors of the Kunsthaus. Staging a virtual landscape in the museum, Eliasson addressed the relationship between nature, culture and the human being. The spectators not only became conscious of their own movements, the room and its acoustics, but experienced them in an entirely new way. In addition to its aesthetic qualities, there was something threatening about lava; it was as if the Kunsthaus architecture was gradually becoming submerged in it.

The process-oriented cooperation with Eliasson within the framework of Project: Collection endeavored to formulate the model of a “temporalized” museum. Eliasson thinks of a museum collection not merely as the sum of its objects but as of “a forum, a platform for discussion.”

After several years of cooperation, this exhibition marked the last phase of Project: Collection with the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. He concentrated on reacting to the architectural-social circumstances, cultural traditions and personnel-related constellations and possibilities of Zug. The act of collecting is not seen as the mere acquisition and classification of artworks, but as an artistic process in which the viewer, the work and the museum convey themselves anew with regard to the constitution of reality.

In 2009, Eliasson designed a complex “perception parcours” throughout the Kunsthaus. The visitors moved consciously through the transmuted building in a whole new way, happening across new video projection works, light installations, fog rooms, a spectacular colour circle and a moss wall as they go. Also on display were photographic long-term studies of the sun's movement, which were created in cooperation with the museum team in the Zug region. In addition, the artist showed his very first oil painting as well as first video works.