Giant art screen tells London’s moving story at Crossrail’s new Canary Wharf station

Artist Michal Rovner and her impressive 'Transitions' movie artwork unveiled at Crossrail's not-yet open Canary Wharf station. Picture: CWG CWG

Artist Michal Rovner has unveiled a 50ft screen artwork showing London’s humanity, history and timeline at Crossrail’s new Canary Wharf station even months before it’s due to open.

Share Email this article to a friend To send a link to this page you must be logged in.

The supersized digital installation records elements from different London locations while "erasing visual information" to obscure specifics of time and place.

"I wanted to encapsulate and summarize this place," she says. "It's London with the mystery of fog, rich theatre, literature and architecture, a mixture of present and past, a world full of monuments, testimonies of a dramatic and grand history living within the vivid present time marching constantly into the future."

Rovner's Transitions artwork is the first of Crossrail Art Foundation's programme for 10 works of public art being installed at seven of the new Elizabeth line stations.

It is on a vast LED screen at the Quay Level in Crossrail Place, drawing influence from the not-yet-opened station's dramatically-sculpted escalators, platforms and subways.

Each individual silhouette in the movie-artwork has been filmed by Rovner to show individualism and humanity, although each has been abstracted to the point of anonymity.

It shows "the tide of humanity" that ebbs and flows to the stop and start of the London Underground.