Experience Olafur Eliasson’s immersive sound and light installation highlighting the Great Salt Lake’s urgent decline, March 26–April 4, 2026, in Salt Lake City’s Memory Grove.
Olafur Eliasson: A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake
March 26–April 4, 2026
Wake the Great Salt Lake, Salt Lake City
From March 26 through April 4, art lovers and environmental advocates are invited to Salt Lake City to experience A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake, a striking new artwork by Icelandic Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Presented each evening in Salt Lake City’s Memory Grove, the artwork comprises a musical composition and a colorful light projection that unfurls after dark upon the surface of a large, elevated sphere.
The music for A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake uses field recordings of local animals and natural phenomena drawn from existing archives and new recordings made for the project. By bringing the surprising sounds of the animals and the natural surroundings to urban space, Eliasson’s work highlights the intertwined, more-than-human connections between humans and their fragile ecosystems.
Visit wakegsl.org for full information and to RSVP.
The large-scale sound and light installation marks Eliasson’s first installation in the Intermountain West and the culminating experience of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a public art initiative inspiring awareness and action around the lake’s rapid decline. Wake the Great Salt Lake is a partnership of the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Salt Lake City Mayor’s Office, and the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge, which brings together cities and their leaders to develop innovative, temporary public art projects that address important civic issues. The public art activities of Wake the Great Salt Lake also included twelve art projects by local artists or those with Utah ties, expressing the community’s concerns and hopes for the lake.
Eliasson’s works 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. 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 centers of Copenhagen, Paris, and London. Passers-by could touch fragments of the Greenlandic glacial ice and witness its fragility as it disappeared before them. 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, 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 offers nature lovers and culture seekers from across the American West to gather together, consider what is at stake, and commit to the actions necessary to restore and preserve Great Salt Lake.
wakegsl.org
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