Installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2003, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project transformed industrial architecture into a collective atmosphere. The vast hall was filled with mist and lit by a glowing semi-circular disc of yellow light, mirrored overhead to form an artificial sun. Visitors lay on the floor, bathed in its glow, turning the museum into both stage and landscape.

Scale is destabilized. The hall’s monumental proportions dissolve into haze, while the sun — flat, fabricated, and incomplete — reads as cosmic. The ordinary act of looking upward becomes planetary in scope.

Representation here is double-edged. The sun is not the sun; it is light, mirrors, and mist performing as climate. The mirror ceiling reflects viewers back into the space, multiplying bodies into a collective image of spectatorship.

Materiality is stripped down: monofrequency lamps, fog machines, mirrors. Yet the effect is overwhelming. The simplest components construct an experience that feels elemental and sublime.

Within a Gesamtkunstwerk frame, The Weather Project collapses art, architecture, science, and performance into one total environment. It is not a sculpture within space but an atmosphere that redefines space itself. The work demonstrates that coherence can be created not by objects, but by climate — by designing conditions that shift perception and create resonance between body, building, and cosmos.