Level 0 is a designated exhibition space at the subterranean basement level of ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, reserved to and specially designed for international light art, video art and installations. For the most part, new acquisitions has been funded from the Carlsberg Foundation’s donation to ARoS Aarhus Art Museum of DKK 40m over a ten year period.

Being inside the installations of American artist duo Jonah Freeman (b. 1975, Santa Fe, USA) & Justin Lowe (b. 1976, Dayton, USA) is like stepping onto a film set where the other actors have gone home, and the cameras are switched off. Since 2008 the duo has been working on a variety of historical and fictional narratives in their large, labyrinthine, and architectural installations.

Freeman & Lowe's works explore the dynamics between a society and its counterculture. The works confront us both physically and intellectually.

The main narrative is about the fictional city called "San San", from the literary sci-fi tale The Year 2000, written by futurist Herman Kahn in 1967. Here Kahn imagined that the cities along the American west coast from San Diego to San Francisco would grow together to form a gigantic urban complex. The area was named 'San San'.

The storm room installation is a full-scale replica of a dilapidated and abandoned dental office in Japan. From the outside, the work just looks like a large wooden box, but upon stepping inside you find yourself immersed in a raging storm complete with lashing rain, lightning and thunder. Ten minutes long in total, the work begins with a soft patter of rain, but soon the storm sets in. Lightning strikes and thunder roars. When the storm finally subsides and the rain slows and stops, you can hear someone moving around in the room next door.

With this work, the artists endeavour to turn our perception of reality and fiction upside down.

Donation 2018 Augustinus Fonden.

James Turrell’s (b. 1943) light work is contrived by artificial light. The viewer confronts a smouldering red light field which is fractured by a blue and yellow light that slit-formingly cuts into it, thus introducing tridimensionality into a diffuse opal-hued light. Instead of a spectacular effect, this shimmering field of colour produces a sense of thoughtful, reticent drama.

Swiss Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962) has created an installation especially for The 9 spaces where the guest in just 8 minutes can experience 24-hours. Her unique video/sound installation is staging one of daily life’s banal, yet magic moments: the dawn of light. Rist has established a living room with furniture, wall paper, windows and plants. Video, sound and light create different atmospheres in the dawn of light. She seems preoccupied with the seemingly ordinary, well known aspects of life. But there is a twist. There is something strange and unfamiliar about the house –underlined by the fact that the artist has created a home in something as unnatural and alien as the space of a museum.

The Danish-Islandic Olafur Eliasson born 1967 is a well established, modern artist. Eliasson has earned his fame making large scale artworks that combine natural science with art. In The 9 Spaces at ARoS Eliasson combines these two elements yet again with great effect in Surroundings. By confronting the viewer with different physical experiments he challenges the sense of sight and makes our eyes see something which is not there. Eliasson thereby seek to create a disorientation in how we interact with the world and how we create the idea of ourselves by interacting with the things that surrounds us.

Mariko Mori’s work is in elegant and fitting manner combining spirituality and cyber technology. Tom Na H-lu was the name given by the ancient Celts to the place where the human soul took up abode before being reborn. To the Celts, Tom Na H-lu was in the shape of a tall monolith. Mori has recreated this monolith in matt glass. The glass sculpture contains a computer-controlled LED light source, which changes colour whenever a star dies and when the celestial bodies known as neutrinos, which are elementary particles created by a fusion between sun and star, move in space. Via the internet this work is linked to a supercomputer in the Super Kamiokande Observatory in Tokyo University.