Lifeworld is an invitation to contemplate who you are and where you are, here and now.

I see our activity online as not so dissimilar from walking through the physical spaces of Piccadilly Circus or Times Square. In a time defined by speed and multitasking, our online activity often takes place simultaneously across multiple platforms.

This rapid circulation of information and visual stimulation is all happening while your files upload to or download from WeTransfer, an efficient space for sharing information with friends, colleagues, family and the world.

In these moments of heightened activity, the artwork relaxes your sense of depth and time, showing the immediate site anew.

On display at 20:24, the spaces on WeTransfer that often displays crisp, sensational advertising imagery, dissolves into the soft, slow, liminal perspectives of Lifeworld.

The artwork relaxes your sense of depth and time, confronting you with a choice to see the immediate site anew. Now these spaces, like the artwork itself, are open to our interpretations.

— Olafur Eliasson

The Icelandic-Danish artist is internationally renowned for public installations that challenge the way we perceive and co-create our environments.

To Eliasson, public spaces are crucial to our cities, “com[ing] to life when they host a plurality of perspectives, co-created with whoever is there at that point in time – protesters, tourists, street performers, commuters – children and adults, individuals and crowds.”

In 2003, Eliasson made The Weather Project, 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 in 2014, Paris in 2015, and London in 2018. Passers-by could touch fragments of the Greenlandic glacial ice and witness its fragility as it disappeared before them.

On the occasion of the 2020 German Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Eliasson created Earth Speakr together with children around the world and with support from the German Federal Foreign Office; the global artwork invites kids to speak up for the planet. In 2022, Eliasson opened Shadows travelling on the sea of the day, a cluster of large site-specific mirror pavilions that draw attention to the delicate habitat of the Qatari desert outside Doha.

Olafur Eliasson is WeTransfer’s 2024 Guest Curator.

Olafur Eliasson sees the world through light and color, and through Lifeworld is inviting us to do the same. In this interview we speak to the artist about the duality of technology, relinquishing control, and what it really means to disrupt public space.

Lifeworld aims to draw attention to the common world for which we all share responsibility.