We have each walked though city squares where brightly lit advertisements dazzle with images of exotic desires. Awe-inspiring in themselves, contemporary inner-city areas are nevertheless palpably functionalized and tightly programmed – designated overwhelmingly to consumption and work. The more we think on them, the more we are aware of how these places bound potential and constrain expression, says Olafur Eliasson. “Sites like Piccadilly and Times Square are enormously impressive spectacles; it’s a thrill; it’s a rollercoaster-style joyride. But I am not offered a choice, except to spend or to leave.”

In Lifeworld, we become conscious of our sensorial relationships to urban public space anew. Part of the ever-evolving history and structure of our cities, public spaces hold the potential to be more than the physical fabric we traverse.

Instead, this groundbreaking original work invites viewers to restore a sense of agency. “Once you have been granted the opportunity to question the world around you, you are suddenly confronted with the opportunity of having a choice,” he says. What cities, lives and environments do we want to inhabit?”

For Eliasson, it is not just a statement of hope in the future of society but the culmination of a personal journey toward greater vulnerability. Eliasson recalls Jenny Holzer’s electronic billboard hanging over the busy streets of New York with the words “Protect Me From What I Want” (from Survival (1983–85)). In the early 1980s, four or five years before going to art school, Eliasson’s life was breakdancing, he says. And at this time, Holzers’ phrase appeared as though a shining truth; a call to strengthen himself to withstand a hostile world.“I was so busy armoring, shielding – I had a Panzer around myself, protecting me,” he says. “And being me, I also put it around my emotional self.”

The end result was a lasting, resilient detachment, says Eliasson. “I have numbed myself, by shielding myself. So much that I don’t know anymore what I feel. I don’t feel anything,” the artist says, seated in his Berlin studio. “And I have lost touch with myself first of all.”

While the process built the resilience that is necessary to make work in public, he explains, he has recently begun peeling the armour away. “I am in the process of unprotecting myself,” Eliasson says.

These emotional threads braid the urban fabric. The passer-by who sees Lifeworld in Piccadilly Circus or TImes Square encounters a space suddenly stripped of fixed meaning and the hectoring demands of commerce – providing a moment to impose their own meaning. This psychological understanding of public space is “spatial theory for me as well,” he says.

In preparation for Lifeworld, Studio Olafur Eliasson spent 8 months calibrating what the artist calls “the most precise blur” as a finely developed tool to break down the hard lines of our city and dissolve our limitations. What emerges is “a sort of misted mirror, offering a radically different perspective on our immediate environment”, that aims to draw attention to the common world for which we all share responsibility.

Eliasson believes that reconnecting with ourselves is one key step to getting in touch with one another. The experience of Lifeworld is essentially communal. As Eliasson writes in his artist statement: “I believe public spaces come to life when they host a plurality of perspectives, co-created with whoever is there at that point in time – protesters, tourists, street performers, commuters – children and adults, individuals and crowds.”

This original work is motivated by Eliasson’s recognition that our present lives are being shaped by industries that aim to predict the future — A.I., climate forecasting, financial technologies and healthcare systems — which promise to make us feel safe as our planet spins out of control. While they provide security, they likewise represent a false hope that some in global cities can isolate themselves from planetary instability, the artist explains: “If anything is predictable about the climate crisis, it’s that we are not solving it.” Amid this uncertainty, he explains, public artworks offer a chance to reconnect with one-another, in a collective effort to learn to live in uncertain times, and even to embrace the potential of a so-far shapeless future.

In his Berlin studio, Eliasson explains that the blur is in fact precise because – as an abstraction – it offers up a more truthful representation of the current time and our feelings connected to it. “Isn’t it in the interest of space to support honesty, trust, truth?” he asks. Can we experience “essentially the re-humanisation of what we share – the public space we own together?”

The works of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) explore the relevance of art in the world at large. Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows – featuring installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and film – have appeared in major museums around the globe.  His art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self and community. 

Eliasson is internationally-renowned for his public installations that challenge the way we perceive and co-create our environments. In 2003, he made ‘The weather project’, a glowing indoor sun shrouded in mist at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London. In 2008, Eliasson constructed four expansive artificial waterfalls along the Manhattan and Brooklyn shorelines for ‘The New York City Waterfalls’. He has also explored art’s potential to address climate change: for ‘Ice Watch’, he brought large blocks of free-floating glacial ice to the city centres of Copenhagen in 2014, Paris in 2015, and London in 2018. Passers-by could touch fragments of the Greenlandic glacial ice and witness its fragility as it disappeared before them. On the occasion of the 2020 German Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Eliasson created ‘Earth Speakr’ together with children around the world and support from the German Federal Foreign Office; the global artwork invites kids to speak up for the planet. In 2022, Eliasson opened ‘Shadows travelling on the sea of the day’, a cluster of large site-specific mirror pavilions that draw attention to the delicate habitat of the Qatari desert outside Doha.

In 2012, Eliasson started the social business Little Sun, and in 2014, he and Sebastian Behmann founded Studio Other Spaces, an office for art and architecture. In 2019, Eliasson was named UNDP Goodwill Ambassador for climate action. In 2023, he received the Praemium Imperiale from the Japanese imperial family for outstanding contributions to the development, promotion, and progress of the arts.

Located in Berlin, Studio Olafur Eliasson comprises a large team of craftspeople, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialised technicians.