Event opening of “A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake,” by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson at Memory Grove on Thursday, March, 26, 2026, in Salt Lake City. Photo: Marielle Scott for Salt Lake City Arts Counci

Artist Olafur Eliasson brings the Great Salt Lake to Memory Grove through field recordings, light, and a three-story sphere

SALT LAKE CITY, UT — A new large-scale art installation is turning concern for the Great Salt Lake into something visitors can see and hear.

From March 26 through April 4, the temporary work, A Symphony of Disappearing Sounds for the Great Salt Lake, activates nightly at Memory Grove, where sound and shifting light play across a large, elevated sphere. The installation is part of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a citywide public art initiative led by the Salt Lake City Arts Council and the Mayor’s Office. The project is by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson and marks his first commissioned work in Utah and the Intermountain West, according to the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Office and the Salt Lake City Arts Council.

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The installation opens to visitors at 8 p.m. each night, with the work beginning at 9 p.m. and running approximately 30 minutes. Admission is free.

The sphere at the center of the piece is roughly the size of a three-story building. Across its surface, light and color shift in sync with a sound composition built from more than 150 field recordings of animals and natural phenomena tied to the Great Salt Lake ecosystem — birds, amphibians, insects, and mammals. The composition was created with UK-based music producer Koreless, according to the project website.

Rather than bringing viewers to the lake, the installation brings the lake into the city.

Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said in a March 23 announcement that the artwork arrives at a critical moment for the lake and connects its future directly to the region’s own health. Eliasson, in the same announcement, described the Great Salt Lake as “a dynamic living system” and asked whether people can truly feel “the immense scale of what is disappearing.”

The installation is the capstone of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a temporary public art project supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Public Art Challenge. The broader initiative includes 12 projects by Salt Lake City-based artists or artists with Utah ties, all focused on the lake’s rapid decline and its implications for the region.

The work does not frame the Great Salt Lake as a distant landscape or backdrop, but as something alive, vulnerable, and bound up with daily life along the Wasatch Front. By placing that experience at the center of Salt Lake City, the installation asks people not just to admire the lake, but to pay attention to it.