Olafur Eliasson tests a model of “A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake,” which will be temporarily displayed at Memory Grove in Salt Lake City.

As the water of the Great Salt Lake disappears, exposing an arsenic-filled lakebed, the once straightforward name “Salt Lake City” has become an emblem of lives that are vulnerable as the landscape shifts, and what we could lose if we don’t take action. The lake has shaped life across the region for generations, from skiing powder days to migration patterns among the many processes shaping the region. Opening March 26 and running through April 4 at Salt Lake City’s Memory Grove Park, A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake builds on that tension as the culmination of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a multi-year initiative bringing together public art, performance, and community engagement to address the lake’s ongoing decline. Created by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, in collaboration with UK-based music producer Koreless, the installation draws from field recordings captured across the lake’s ecosystem.

Over the past three years, the project has taken shape through an extended collaboration led by the Salt Lake City Arts Council under the direction of Felicia Baca. As executive director, Baca works as an advocate and connector for the city’s arts ecosystem, building relationships between artists and organizations while expanding opportunities for residents to engage with cultural work. Developing the work required assembling partners across disciplines. The process included collaboration with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and other community partners, bringing cultural and artistic perspectives into a single public work. Central to that effort, Wake the Great Salt Lake Lead Andrew Shaw cultivated relationships among a local cohort of artists, helped steward the project’s educational and ecological accuracy, and coordinated the complexities of working at this scale with an international artist. For Baca, the installation represents both years of preparation and a broader moment for the city—one that positions Salt Lake City as a place where environmental urgency and contemporary art meaningfully intersect, while expanding local access to large-scale work by internationally recognized artists. “We’re providing important education and are excited for this moment for our city. This is such an immense opportunity to draw attention to the diverse communities at stake and the working Salt Lake art scene more broadly.”

Inviting an artist like Eliasson, whose work has long explored perception, light, and environmental systems, positions the Great Salt Lake within a broader global conversation. Eliasson says, “It is an honour for me to have been selected to collaborate with Wake the Great Salt Lake. I’m impressed by the critical work that many in the local community are currently doing to secure the future of the lake.”

Thinking about how we process sensory information, Eliasson frames the work as a way of reconnecting perception to the environment through sensory experience. The installation is built to make those connections tangible in a shared public setting—creating space for a kind of emotional engagement that scientific data alone cannot provide. Non-human voices of plants and insects awaken a deeper understanding of the lives we take for granted. Eliasson says, “Personally, I find great inspiration in considering how we humans fit into larger, more-than-human systems that comprise land, water, air, and other species.”

That grounding comes into focus through the composition by Koreless, forming the core of the installation. Built from more than 150 recordings of animals and environmental phenomena connected to the Great Salt Lake, the score draws on birds, brine flies, insects, amphibians, mammals, and shifting atmospheric textures sourced from archival material as well as new recordings made for the project. These sounds form the structure of the piece itself. Sound carries across distance and lingers in memory differently than sight. Small sounds accumulate, forming a sense of place, and their absence reshapes how that place is understood.

Rather than composing with conventional instruments, the piece is made from arranged field recordings. Using concatenative synthesis, the recordings are divided into tiny sonic units and rearranged into new musical patterns. In this process, environmental sounds take on musical roles: a bird call becomes percussion, insects form a shifting tonal bed, and wind or distant environmental noise are reshaped into pulses and sustained textures. The result is a composition in which the lake does not serve as background material but becomes the instrument. The composition translates the lake’s soundscape into something more perceptible, bringing forward relationships that might otherwise remain diffuse or unnoticed. Sounds that typically sit at the edge of attention are gathered and structured, allowing them to be heard collectively rather than as isolated events.

The visual component unfolds alongside this score, using the surface of a large, elevated sphere in Memory Grove as a site for projection. Each evening, a light work moves across the sphere’s curved surface, shifting through geometric configurations, crystalline forms, and wave-like patterns that evolve in sync with the sound. Activated after dusk, the installation depends on the conditions of night, with light and sound working together to reshape the park as an immersive environment. The sphere establishes a focal point within the park, giving the installation both physical presence and spatial coherence as audiences gather and orient themselves around it.

Presented as part of Wake the Great Salt Lake and supported by the Salt Lake City Arts Council, the Mayor’s Office, and Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Public Art Challenge, the installation takes shape within a broader effort to engage the lake’s ongoing environmental decline through shared experience rather than data or policy alone. The title makes the stakes clear without overstating them. The composition is built from a living system under pressure, and the sounds it draws on are tied to conditions that are shifting in real time. What is heard is specific to a place, and that specificity carries an awareness of change that does not need to be emphasized to be understood.

For Koreless, the constraint of working entirely with environmental recordings defines the structure of the work, requiring a method that builds from within the material rather than imposing form from the outside. For Eliasson, the installation becomes a way of making relationships between city and lake perceptible through shared experience. Together, the collaboration produces a work that does not attempt to represent the Great Salt Lake from a distance, but instead creates the conditions for sustained attention.

As the shoreline recedes, arsenic-laced dust threatens 2.5 million Utahns downwind, critical wetlands for migratory birds continue to disappear, and declining lake levels begin to affect regional snowfall patterns that sustain the state’s winter economy. In February 2026, Utah lawmakers introduced a resolution urging federal intervention, framing the lake’s decline as an environmental and public health crisis that could require billions to address.

Within that context, the work operates as part of a broader effort to keep the lake present within public consciousness at a time when coordinated action is beginning to take shape. By working directly with the sounds of the ecosystem, the installation reinforces the urgency of a landscape that continues to shift even as it defines the region around it.

A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake, Memory Grove
300 N Canyon Rd, Salt Lake City. Nightly activations, Mar. 26-Apr. 4: gates open at 8:00 p.m.; installation begins at 9:00 p.m. Free and open to the public; RSVP recommended.

Panel discussion: March 25, 2026, Salt Lake City Public Library (Nancy Tessman Auditorium), featuring Olafur Eliasson, Dr. Bonnie Baxter (Great Salt Lake Institute, Westminster University), and Emily Lewis (Culp & Kelly; The Ripple Effect).

Hannah McBeth

Hannah McBeth studied art history, classics, and Mediterranean archaeology before getting a Master’s at Cambridge University. She enjoys writing, hiking, and traveling to far-off places. Follow her on Twitter @hannahmcbee.