The artist Roger Hiorns, who once converted a council flat into a glittering cavern of blue crystals, is planning a more sinister installation for Birmingham – a Boeing 737 buried on a derelict canal island that can be reached by a narrowboat journey and a spiral staircase.

“It is probably one for the claustrophobic to steer clear of,” Jonathan Watkins, director of the Ikon Gallery, said. Since he first discussed the plan with Hiorns, it has acquired even more ominous symbolism from air disasters such as the recent Sinai crash, which killed everyone on board. “There are better days and worse days when this is a more difficult project to discuss.”

The plane will be buried on an island made by a loop in the canal system, once the heart of industrial and manufacturing in Birmingham, now derelict land and decaying warehouses are being redeveloped, mainly as expensive housing and retail.

“The developers who own the site and the council are very keen on the idea,” Watkins said, sounding slightly surprised, “and getting hold of the plane is no problem, there are loads of them around decommissioned and stripped out, you can pick one up for about £50,000.”

Roger Hiorns’ celebrated blue crystal work, Seizure. Guardian

Once inside, visitors will be free to wander around the cabin, described as “indistinguishable from the interior of planes used for short-haul flights, except for the lack of aerial views”.

The gallery is also planning the most comprehensive retrospective to date on the work of Hiorns, who was born in Birmingham in 1975. His most famous work, Seizure, commissioned by Artangel in 2008 , involved spraying the interior surfaces of a condemned London flat with copper sulphate, which then blossomed into eerily beautiful – and toxic – blue crystals. It was intended to be temporary but was such a huge hit with the public that the opening was repeatedly extended, and finally the whole flat, complete with light fittings and gas pipes, was cut into sections and then reconstructed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Untitled (Buried Aircraft), which will be open throughout the summer of 2017, looks certain to have the same eerie pulling power, particularly since admission will be free. Ikon has begun fundraising for the estimated total cost of about £500,000. “Anyone plane mad, with a lot of money, and concerned with the development of western art history – please contact us,” Watkins said.

Hiorns and the gallery are also planning a less threatening intervention at St Philip’s Cathedral in Birmingham next spring, lit by the soaring stained glass windows designed by another local boy, the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. Hiorns has persuaded the cathedral to take out all the seating, and get the choir to sing while lying on the floor. Both artist and gallery thought of this as a purely artistic event: the cathedral, however, has embraced the project, and will conduct three church services in the transformed space, with the dean preaching – though he will be permitted to stand.



An earlier piece by Roger Hiorns at Nottingham Contemporary. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

Visitors to the gallery will also be encouraged to lie on a unique chair created by the French design student Philippine Hamen, as a tribute to a short story she loves, David Lodge’s The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up, about a man who is tired of life. Visitors will be encouraged to stretch out face down on the padded lounger and read the story through a hole pierced for the head – though on busy days, Watkins said, they may be gently discouraged from reading the entire story.

Lodge, a gallery trustee, was touched and astonished to be told Hamen wanted to present him with her creation. “I thought of just placing it on his doorstep in a box so he would find it in the morning,” she said, “but I was persuaded that would not be a good idea.”

She was equally astonished to learn that the story, widely available in translation in France, had been published only in English half a century ago in an edition of 100 copies. The outcome has delighted both of them: Lodge is buying the chair as a gift to the gallery; the story, with five others, is being reprinted in English by Vintage.

In April the gallery opens a major exhibition by the American light installation artist, Dan Flavin, the most extensive in the UK since the crowd and critic pleasing show at the Hayward in 2006. Flavin, who died in 1996, originally used cheap, off-the-peg commercial lighting to create dazzlingly colourful works – the fluorescent tubes now have to be manufactured specially for the pieces. The exhibition, which will take over the entire gallery, is titled with a quote from Flavin: “It is what it is and it ain’t nothing else”.

A visitor inspects a light installation by Dan Flavin. Photograph: Alexandra Beier/Reuters

From late January, a haunting photographic essay on Birmingham will be seen for the first time since it was commissioned in the 1960s, when the American photographer Janet Mendelsohn was a student at the University of Birmingham. Her images of everyday life in the deprived Balsall Heath area include many of a sex worker, Kathleen, with whom she formed a close relationship. The exhibition is called Varna Road – once described by the tabloids as “the wickedest street in England” – and includes a photograph of Kathleen waiting for a client on the kerb of the shadowy street. The street no longer exists: “It’s as if Birmingham tried to airbrush it out of its history,” Watkins said.

Ikon’s first exhibition of 2016 will be a film by the Vietnamese artist Dinh Q Lê, about the islands metre-deep in guano – bird droppings – off the coast of Peru. When the uninhabited islands were discovered in the 19th century the guano was sold for fertiliser, made millionaires of some and provoked warfare over rival ownership claims.

The artist has emailed a clip to demonstrate that filming using drones continues on site this week. “This is an exhibition that opens in about seven weeks,” Watkins said, with a slight grimace of unease. “We are of course incredibly excited that he should still be working on this.”