The internationally successful Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has been cooperating with the Kunsthaus Zug since 2003 within the framework of ‘Project: Collection’. He began in 2004 by conveying a general overview of his various areas of artistic work and presenting his huge model room, which amounted to the relocation of a laboratory into the museum. In 2005-2006 he went on to conduct the Burgbach brook through the Kunsthaus by means of a wooden trough three hundred metres in length, thus connecting nature, town and museum in a project reminiscent of the Suonen, historical irrigation channels of which there is a vast network in Switzerland.

This radical outdoor water project is now being followed by a spectacular indoor installation, likewise based on a natural element: Icelandic lava. Some sixty tons of this material cover the floors of the Kunsthaus. Staging a virtual landscape in the museum, Eliasson addresses the relationship between nature, culture and the human being. The spectator not only becomes conscious of his own movements, the room and it acoustics, but experiences them in an entirely new way. In the entrance area and the bar, lava and the furnishings meet in an encounter of friction. A changed environment interferes with changed perception – and vice versa. Their mutual conditionality, relativity and transformability becomes apparent. Unlike Walter de Maria’s Earth Room, Eliasson’s Lava Floor can be walked on, and it is spread throughout the building. The association with Pompeii comes into play. In addition to its aesthetic qualities, there is something threatening about lava; it is as if the Kunsthaus architecture was gradually becoming submerged in it.

Eliasson’s installation also implies a criticism of the traditional museum, which serves the leisure society with consumable events and – with the conventional presentation of objects – clings to the conception of timelessness. Art which reflects on the act of seeing, however, requires a self-reflective – and thus self-critical – museum as a partner. The process-oriented cooperation with Eliasson within the framework of ‘Project: Collection’ endeavours to respond to that requirement and formulate an alternative – the model of a “temporalized” museum. Eliasson conceives of a museum collection not merely as the sum of its objects but as “a forum, a platform for discussion”.