On four evenings in May 2026, Eliasson created a temporary, site-specific work that dialogues with the stunning architecture of St. Pius Church in Meggen, Switzerland, and Víkingur Ólafsson’s live performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The artwork explores the relationships between space, light, and sound as it activates the building and extends the concert out into the world.

The facades of the church, which was built in the 1960s by the Swiss architect Franz Füeg, are constructed from panels of marble that are thin enough to allow light to pass through. During the day, light streams in from outside to illuminate the sanctuary. Eliasson exploited this quality of the building by projecting visuals onto the marble walls from the outside, so that they would be visible inside. The walls seemed to dissolve, expand, and contract as the building was alternately flooded with colour and reduced to black and white. Patterns, geometric shapes, and other motifs from Eliasson’s practice unfurled in dialogue with the grain of the marble walls and the polyphony of Bach’s composition.

Eliasson said: ‘I have long been fascinated by the potential of translating soundwaves into light to create synaesthetic experiences that transcend the boundaries of both media. The shadows of sounds and the unforeseeable shapes of love, 2026, extends these investigations with an emphasis on the effects of echoes and rever­berations on our perception of time and space.’