Announcement
As the lake’s ecological crisis worsens, the artist’s new site-specific installation in Salt Lake City renders audible what is increasingly at risk of vanishing.
From March 26 through April 4, audiences are invited to experience A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake, a new large-scale work by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Presented nightly in Salt Lake City’s Memory Grove, the project combines an original musical composition with a vivid light projection that unfolds after dark across the surface of a towering, elevated sphere.
The electronic musical composition draws on field recordings of local wildlife and environmental phenomena, sourced from archival materials along with new recordings made specifically for the installation. By transporting the sounds of the lake’s ecosystem into an urban park setting, Eliasson foregrounds the fragile interdependence between human and more-than-human life, rendering audible what is increasingly at risk of vanishing.
The installation marks Eliasson’s first work in the Intermountain West and serves as the culminating event of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a two-year public art initiative highlighting the lake’s rapid decline. Organized through a partnership between the Salt Lake City Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Office, and the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge, the initiative has supported temporary works that respond to the lake’s urgent crisis. In addition to Eliasson’s installation, Wake the Great Salt Lake has featured 12 projects by local artists and artists with Utah ties, channeling local concerns and hopes surrounding the lake’s future.
Eliasson, whose practice has long examined perception and environmental awareness, is widely known for immersive public installations. His 2003 work, The weather project, featured 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. With Ice Watch, he transported blocks of glacial ice from Greenland to urban centers in Copenhagen, Paris, and London, inviting viewers to confront the material reality of climate change. In 2024, Eliasson broadcast Lifeworld on screens in iconic public spaces around the world. Commissioned by CIRCA, the short, blurred sequences transported passers-by into a space of uncertainty unlike the highly defined city spaces they are used to.
Without action, the Great Salt Lake’s collapse would have major ecological and economic impacts on the region. A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake positions art as a site of collective listening and reflection — an opportunity to consider what stands to be lost and what might yet be preserved.
To learn more and RSVP, visit wakegsl.org.
