You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service.

This is Hard Talk with me, Zainab Badawi.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program, and I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zainab Badawi, at Tate Modern in London.

My guest has opened a new exhibition here.

He's the award-winning Icelandic Danish artist

Olofore Eliyerson. He uses his art to involve people and communities in debate about a range of

issues, including climate change. In the past, he stained rivers green with non-toxic dye,

created waterfalls in New York.

What's his latest exhibition about and can art really change the world?

Onopo Eliyoson, welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you, Yersen.

You had a fairly unorthodox upbringing.

Your parents were extremely young when they had you, your mother 20, your father

19, born in Iceland, moved to Denmark. Your mother was a seamstress, your father a cook. How did

your early life influence you and your work? Well, my father moved back to Iceland,

and so I would spend my vacations in Iceland talking around in nature when he was

out painting. He also worked as an artist actually and my mother then in Denmark would make sure

I would go to school and you could say that my mother sort of had the more disciplined approach

to life where my father supported a more hedonistic approach and being in nature over the summer

and playing around as a child

with my father that really influenced me a lot but also to be fair my mother giving me a sense of

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