CIRCA to present Lifeworld, a landmark series of five site-specific original works by the celebrated Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson.
Eliasson, internationally renowned for artworks that address how we co-create our worlds, is transforming several of the world’s most iconic urban screens into expansive abstractions. Lifeworld will appear every evening at 20:24 for three months (1st October—31st December 2024) on Piccadilly Lights in London, K-Pop Square in Seoul, Limes Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and throughout November in Times Square, New York and globally on WeTransfer.com.
Lifeworld appears at a time marked by polarising public debate: during the final days of the US presidential election and throughout the month of November, the public artwork will be presented synchronised across Times Squares’ 92 screens, in collaboration with the world’s largest and longest-running digital public art programme, Midnight Moment. Eliasson speaks to the importance of public space for
“hosting a plurality of perspectives, co-created with whoever is there at that point in time”.
Following other major public interventions by Eliasson, such as Ice Watch (2014), which drew attention to environmental and social issues, Lifeworld calls on us today to look at ourselves as individuals, to contemplate who we are and where we are, here and now.
Our connections and sensorial relationships to urban public space form the basis of this ambitious new artwork created for CIRCA. To Eliasson, 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. In each iteration of Lifeworld, onlookers appear in a sort of mise en abyme, a recursive depiction of the onlooker within the imagery – allowing the viewer to see themselves seeing space. What emerges is
“a sort of mirror, offering a radically different perspective on our immediate environment”.
It aims to draw attention to the common world for which we all share responsibility.
Lifeworld explores how soft abstraction – images that are intentionally undefined and open to our personal interpretations – can reveal our place in the world in 2024. Sites like Piccadilly and Times Square are enormously impressive spectacles, with their advertising screens that usually display crisp, sensational imagery. It’s a thrill; but the environment also determines my actions – driving me mostly to spend or to consume. Lifeworld shows the immediate site anew and its hazy qualities may prompt questions. If you are suddenly confronted with the reality of having a choice, you might ask what cities, lives and environments do we want to inhabit? And how do I want to take part in them?
Olafur Eliasson
Lifeworld takes inspiration from the phenomenological notion that in an unmediated world, we inhabit and experience in common with others and nature. With this work, Eliasson suggests that by connecting to the lived here and now of experience, we may reconnect with one another, learn to live in uncertain times, and even to embrace the potential of a so-far shapeless future.
CIRCA 20:24 – SEASON IV PROGRAMME
Lifeworld by Olafur Eliasson (1st October until 31st December 2024)
20:24 BST/GMT London, Piccadilly Lights
20:24 CET Berlin, Limes, Kurfürstendamm
20:24 KST Seoul, COEX K-Pop Square
11:57 EST New York, Times Square*
24/7 WeTransfer, Worldwide*
*Lifeworld will appear every evening throughout November in Times Square, New York, presented in collaboration with the world’s largest and longest-running digital public art programme, Midnight Moment.
*Lifeworld will be available to view (1 October – 31 December 2024) on WeTransfer, inviting a global public to experience the project from anywhere in the world. To discover more, click here
About the artist
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.
HAND-SIGNED PRINTS BY OLAFUR ELIASSON On the occasion of his artwork Lifeworld, CIRCA releases a series of four time-limited-edition prints by Olafur Eliasson. The prints reflect the artist’s long-standing investigation of light, colour, and the ways we perceive and interact with our surroundings. For each screen-print, Eliasson has analysed the light levels and colour palettes of the physical sites of Lifeworld to dematerialise the cityscapes into four evocative colour wheels.
Created especially for CIRCA, the hand-signed edition (£300 +VAT indiv/£1,000 +VAT complete set of four) applies the same system of colour inversion as Eliasson’s artwork Lifeworld. Available 1st October until midnight 31st December 2024, this time-limited-edition harks back to Eliasson’s extensive ‘colour experiment’ painting series, circular canvases that challenge our expectations and encourage our eyes to stay in constant motion.
