For the past 20-plus years, Olafur Eliasson has been plunging viewers into iridescent glows and temporal hazes. This autumn, the thread that links his 2003 Turbine Hall commission, The Weather Project to Feelings Are Fact, his 2010 installation at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, is due to knit itself across the international stage.
On 1 October, Eliasson will unveil a series of video works, titled Lifeworld and commissioned by the London-based digital art platform, Circa, for the electronic billboards in London’s Picadilly Circus, K-pop Square in Seoul and Kurfürstendamm in Berlin.
In concert with the US digital public art programme Midnight Moment, the work will also be shown on the 92 digital displays spanning 41st to 49th Streets in New York’s Time Square.
Online, meanwhile, as Circa’s first digital screen partner, the file transfer service WeTransfer will be showing a companion video to anyone looking to share a file the world over. This comes in the wider context of Eliasson being the 2024 global curator for WePresent, WeTransfer’s arts platform.
Comprised of site-specific travelling shots filmed in each location, Lifeworld melds the global with the hyperlocal. In London, Seoul and Berlin, from October until December, it will be broadcast for three minutes daily at 20:24 local time, in keeping with Circa’s rule to show each new work at the time of day that, literally, says, “Now, this year, 2024”. The New York version will be screened for the month of November, at a time fixed by Midnight Moment’s titular slot, from 11:57pm to 12am.
Circa defines itself as a media disruptor, a spatial pausing, and a platform for ideas. Artists, from Ai Weiwei to, most recently, Marina Abramović, have been commissioned to make a work that distills the present moment.
Circa’s founder, Josef O’Connor, first approached Eliasson over a year and a half ago, thinking of him as someone who could “save the world”: “He’s the guy who put the glacier melting in front of the Tate, the artist always speaking truth to the planet.”
Instead, as films go, Lifeworld is comprehensively out of focus, which O’Connor says, chimes with this moment of social, political and geopolitical confusion. This is particularly tangible in the New York version of the work being broadcast as the country heads to the polls. O’Connor highlights the importance of Eliasson having, as he puts it, “Times Square during the US election in the palm of his hands” and choosing to blur it. In place of any didactic solution, he has provided, in effect, a mirror.
The launch of Lifeworld is combined with the announcement, by Slawn, of the Circa Prize 2024. The winner, chosen from a shortlist of 30 emerging artists, will receive a cash prize of £30,000. A second prize, of £10,000, will be awarded to the artist who has elicited the most online public votes.
