Retrospective of artist behind Weather Project investigates how we respond to nature

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

One tonne of white Lego bricks will be scattered across large tables in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall this summer, allowing anyone who visits to unleash their inner architect.

The Lego project is the work of the artist Olafur Eliasson, the subject of a major retrospective opening at the gallery on Thursday. The exhibition includes a waterfall, a 39-metre corridor of dense fog and a huge wall of reindeer moss from Finland.

Olafur Eliasson review – art's weatherman fogs up Tate Modern Read more

On 26 July the Lego arrives, giving people an opportunity over three weeks to create what they hope or imagine will be the city of the future.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An installation at the Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life exhibition. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex/Shutterstock

Curators said the work was intended to keep on evolving as people modified the efforts of those who had gone before them – a celebration of individual imagination and the “collaborative power of communities”.

Eliasson is best known in the UK for his Weather Project installation in the Turbine Hall in 2003, one of the most popular art installations in Tate Modern’s history, scenes of people lying down and basking in the dazzling fake sunlight not uncommon.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Tate Modern’s director, Frances Morris, credited Eliasson with helping the gallery see how its public spaces could be effectively co-curated with the people who visited.

“When Olafur made that installation we had no idea how the public would respond to this kind of dematerialised installation full of fog and light. The public performed in that space and took it over … it shifted our idea of how we could use the building.”

Tate said the new show, 16 years on, would give British audiences the first opportunity to see the full range of Eliasson’s work.

Embedded in his practice is a concern for the environment. The curator Mark Godfrey said the gallery had consciously chosen pieces that were in Europe. “In terms of shipping we made active choices to bring work by truck and ferry rather than air freight.”

Eliasson’s studio has also taken over the gallery’s Terrace bar, working with Tate to create a vegetarian lunch menu which is organic and locally sourced. Diners are told their courgette salad created only 38 grams of CO 2 emissions.

In the show itself there is lots for the visitor to experience. They can walk along the disorientating corridor of fog, a work called Din Blinde Passager (Your Blind Passenger), or smell and touch the reindeer moss on a 20-metre wall.

“Moss is like lichen,” said Eliasson. “It is not a plant. It lives on the humidity in the air so it is in fact alive when it sits there on the wall.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eliasson’s moss wall at Tate Modern. Photograph: Imageplotter/REX/Shutterstock

On the terrace outside the artist has installed a large waterfall sculpture on scaffolding, which is also part of his investigation into how we think about and respond to the environment.

“It is a real waterfall with real water but it’s also obviously a construction and there is this notion nature is not outside of our creation.”

One of the liveliest environmental debates in the arts is whether museums and theatres should accept the money of BP as a sponsor.

Tate ended its partnership with BP in 2017 and Eliasson was asked whether he would have allowed the show if the oil company was still a sponsor.

“I actually don’t know,” he said. “It is clear that the fossil fuel companies need to be much more radical. It is also clear that a lot of the fossil fuel companies are very conscious about it and even though it is not fast enough they are transforming to renewables as well.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Olafur Eliasson inside Your Spiral View at the exhibition. Photograph: Imageplotter/Rex/Shutterstock

• Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life is at Tate Modern fron 11 July to 5 January.