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.”