Olafur Eliasson Brings a Glowing Great Salt Lake Installation to Salt Lake City
A three-storey sphere lit up Memory Grove Park in Salt Lake City this spring, but the work it carried was less spectacle than warning. Olafur Eliasson’s A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake, his first public project in Utah, translated the lake’s ecological decline into light, sound, and a carefully layered sense of unease.
Presented as part of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a multi-year initiative led by the Salt Lake City Arts Council in partnership with the mayor’s office and Bloomberg Philanthropies, the installation unfolded in a public green space tucked into one of the city’s canyons below Capitol Hill. Each night at 9 p.m., four projectors illuminated the elevated sphere, which had been rented from a party supplier, and turned it into something between a beacon and a speculative planet.
Eliasson built the work around a 30-minute composition assembled with the Welsh producer Koreless from field recordings drawn from the Western Soundscape Archive. Birds, frogs, brine flies, wind, and water formed a shifting acoustic portrait of a lake under pressure. The Great Salt Lake has been shrinking rapidly because of upstream water diversion for agriculture, urban growth, and industry, and the exposed lakebed can generate toxic dust storms carrying arsenic and other pollutants.
The installation’s imagery moved from flickering constellations to rippling streaks, then to gridded meridian lines and pulsating color fields that suggested both weather systems and stained glass. At moments, the sphere seemed to hover as a luminous globe, while the soundscape emphasized nonhuman life rather than human presence. Eliasson has described the work as “a symphony the animals are performing for us,” a formulation that shifts attention away from spectatorship and toward stewardship.
Felicia Baca, director of the Salt Lake City Arts Council, said the project was shaped by a desire to hold space for hope as well as alarm. She noted that Utah’s landscape is deeply tied to local identity, and that climate anxiety has become part of the politics surrounding the lake. The commission also reflects a broader strategy: pairing local artists with internationally recognized figures who share the same environmental concerns.
In Salt Lake City, the result is a public artwork that does not simply illustrate ecological loss. It asks what it means to hear a landscape changing in real time, and what responsibility follows once that change is impossible to ignore.
