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?”

Olafur Eliasson is one of the most influential artists working today, internationally recognised for transforming how we perceive and experience the world around us. Working across installation, sculpture, painting, photography and public space, his practice explores the relationship between perception, participation and shared responsibility, inviting audiences to become active participants in the environments they inhabit.

For more than three decades, Eliasson has created landmark works that challenge conventional ways of seeing. From The Weather Project (2003) at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and The New York City Waterfalls (2008), to Ice Watch (2014–2018), which brought glacial ice from Greenland into public squares to confront the realities of climate change, his projects have demonstrated how art can reshape public consciousness through direct experience. Alongside his artistic practice, Eliasson founded the social enterprise Little Sun, expanding access to solar-powered light worldwide, and serves as a UNDP Goodwill Ambassador for climate action.

In 2024, Eliasson collaborated with CIRCA on Lifeworld, an ambitious public commission presented across digital screens in London, New York, Berlin and Seoul. Appearing nightly for three months, the work transformed some of the world’s most recognisable urban spectacles into immersive fields of colour and light, encouraging millions of viewers to pause and reflect on their relationship to the environments they collectively create. Extending beyond the screens through a series of hand-signed editions and a global partnership with WeTransfer and Times Square Arts, Lifeworld became one of CIRCA’s most expansive international commissions to date.

Born in Copenhagen in 1967 and based in Berlin, Eliasson’s work has been exhibited extensively across the world’s leading museums, biennials and public spaces. Through a practice that bridges art, architecture, science and environmental action, he continues to demonstrate how creativity can help us imagine new ways of living together in an increasingly interconnected world.