Some problems are too large to feel. Climate change is one of them — the numbers are available, the projections are clear, and yet the distance between knowing and feeling remains stubbornly wide. Olafur Eliasson has been trying to close that distance through experience.

Ice Watch is the clearest example. Eliasson transported blocks of glacial ice harvested from Greenland to public squares in Paris, London, and Copenhagen, and left them to melt. No explanation required. People touched them, sat beside them, watched them shrink. The ice was doing something that no graph can do: it was making loss present, immediate, and physical. A glacier retreating in Greenland is an abstraction. A block of ancient ice melting under your hand on a Tuesday afternoon in a city centre is something else entirely. His glacier photographs — the same locations shot twenty years apart — work by a similar logic. The before and after need no commentary. The eye does the work.

This is what art can do that science communication often cannot: it bypasses the defences that facts tend to trigger and creates encounter instead. Whether that encounter translates into changed behaviour is genuinely uncertain — and Eliasson himself does not oversell it. What he argues, more modestly and more convincingly, is that perception precedes action. Before people change what they do, they need to change how they see. The work operates at that prior level — not as a call to action but as a reframing of what is actually at stake.

Eliasson is also an unusual figure in contemporary art because he refuses the separation between aesthetic practice and direct engagement. His studio — one of the largest in the world — functions as a laboratory, an architecture office, and an advocacy operation simultaneously. He advises governments, builds solar energy infrastructure in the developing world, speaks at Davos. That blurring of roles raises a question worth sitting with: does the artistic frame retain its critical independence when it becomes institutional? Or does the scale of the operation change what the work can say and to whom? There is no clean answer. What is clear is that Eliasson represents a specific and serious attempt to make art accountable to the world it describes — not just to the gallery that shows it.

Experience, the book, is in some ways secondary to the work itself — a document of a practice rather than a standalone argument. But it belongs in this collection because it asks something the other entries don't: not what we should do, or what the data shows, or how systems need to change, but what it would take to make people actually feel the weight of what is happening.