Can Art Transform How We Experience Public Space?

Pioneer Works

A conversation between artist Olafur Eliasson and art historian Gloria Sutton, on the occasion of Eliasson’s new public artwork Lifeworld.

Olafur Eliasson

Gloria Sutton

Join us at Pioneer Works for a conversation between artist Olafur Eliasson and art historian Gloria Sutton, on the occasion of Eliasson’s new public artwork Lifeworld.Eliasson and Sutton will discuss how architecture and omnipresent digital technology affect the ways in which we perceive ourselves and interact with one another. They will explore the current state of public space in city centers, and the relevance of abstraction to portray the complexities of our current moment. Art, in Eliasson’s view, can offer alternative ways to comprehend the current pressures that shape existence in the here-and-now.On view in Times Square from November 2nd to 30th, 2024, Lifeworld will use the advertising screens to introduce a slow and undefined blur of shape and color into New York’s iconic city space. Every evening at 11:57PM, the advertising screens that usually display crisp, sensational visuals give way to soft, slow, liminal perspectives derived from the surrounding fast-paced site.The works of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson are driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self and community. Since the early 1990s, his wide-ranging shows—featuring installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and film—have appeared in museums around the globe. Through installations and large-scale artworks Eliasson explores ways to connect sensorily with our immediate environments, as in The weather project, (2003, Tate Modern, London); The New York City Waterfalls (2008); and Ice Watch in Copenhagen (2014), Paris (2015), and London (2018); Commissioned by CIRCA, Lifeworld (2024), is on view in the public spaces of Piccadilly Circus in London, Kpop Square in Seoul, Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and Times Square in New York in collaboration with Midnight Moment by Times Square Arts. Online, the artwork takes shape in the global digital space of WeTransfer.Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Northeastern University. A research affiliate in the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sutton also serves on the Advisory Committee of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Voices in Contemporary Art. Her scholarship has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation and the Getty Research Institute where she is working on her current book, Pattern Recognition: Contemporary Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.This program is presented by Pioneer Works, and made possible in collaboration with WeTransfer and CIRCA.

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Can Art Transform How We Experience Public Space?

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