Installation Art and Sacred Space: Creating Temples in Galleries

BY NICOLE LAU

You walk into a darkened room. Soft light emanates from nowhere and everywhere. The air feels different—charged, expectant. You're not looking at art on a wall—you're inside the art. Your body is part of the composition. Your breath changes. Your thoughts quiet. You've entered a temple disguised as a gallery.

Installation art, at its most powerful, doesn't depict sacred space—it creates it. And in doing so, it proves what mystics have always known: space itself can be a spiritual technology, an architecture of consciousness, a container for transformation.

What Is Installation Art?

Installation art emerged in the 1960s-70s as artists moved beyond objects on pedestals:

• Environment as artwork – The entire space becomes the piece, not individual objects
• Immersive experience – You don't observe from outside; you enter and participate
• Site-specific – Created for a particular location, inseparable from its context
• Multisensory – Engages sight, sound, smell, touch, spatial awareness
• Temporal – Exists for a limited time, then is dismantled (like sand mandalas)
• Transformative intent – Designed to alter consciousness, not just perception

But this isn't new—it's temple architecture. Every cathedral, mosque, temple, and shrine uses the same principles: space, light, sound, and symbol to create conditions for transcendence.

James Turrell: The Light Mystic

James Turrell (born 1943) is a Quaker who works with light as material and perception as medium. His installations are secular cathedrals built from pure luminosity.

The Roden Crater Project (1979-present):

Turrell purchased an extinct volcano in Arizona and has spent 45+ years transforming it into a massive naked-eye observatory—a temple to celestial light:

• Tunnels and chambers – Carved into the volcano, aligned with astronomical events
• Skyspaces – Rooms with apertures framing the sky, making you aware of light as substance
• Celestial alignments – Oriented to solstices, equinoxes, and lunar cycles (like Stonehenge)
• Perceptual shifts – The sky appears to descend, to become tangible, to enter the space
• Meditative duration – Designed for extended viewing, watching light change over hours

This is a modern pyramid, a contemporary Chartres Cathedral, a temple built not to house a deity but to reveal the divine nature of perception itself.

Turrell's Skyspaces:

Turrell has created over 80 Skyspaces worldwide—rooms with ceiling apertures that frame the sky:

• The aperture effect – The sky appears closer, more vivid, almost solid
• Ganzfeld phenomenon – Uniform visual field creates perceptual dissolution
• Dawn and dusk programs – LED lights shift in harmony with natural light transitions
• Meditative seating – Benches positioned for optimal viewing, encouraging stillness

People report mystical experiences in Skyspaces: time distortion, ego dissolution, unity consciousness. Turrell isn't creating illusions—he's revealing the illusory nature of ordinary perception.

He said: "I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire."

Olafur Eliasson: Nature as Cathedral

Olafur Eliasson (born 1967, Iceland/Denmark) creates installations that bring natural phenomena—light, water, fog, temperature—into gallery spaces, transforming museums into experiential temples.

The Weather Project (2003, Tate Modern):

Eliasson installed a massive artificial sun in the Turbine Hall—a semicircular screen with hundreds of mono-frequency lamps creating an orange glow, reflected in ceiling mirrors to form a complete sphere:

• 2 million visitors – People lay on the floor for hours, staring at the "sun"
• Spontaneous rituals – Visitors created shapes with their bodies, visible in the mirror
• Collective meditation – Strangers lying together in silence, sharing awe
• Atmospheric awareness – Fog machines made the air visible, tangible, breathable art

The Tate became a temple to the sun, and Londoners—starved of light in winter—came to worship. This is what sacred space does: it creates conditions for collective transcendence.

Your Rainbow Panorama (2011, ARoS Museum, Denmark):

A circular walkway on a museum rooftop, enclosed in colored glass panels creating a 360-degree rainbow:

• Walking meditation – The circular path encourages circumambulation (like Buddhist kora)
• Color immersion – Each section bathes you in a different hue, affecting mood and perception
• Panoramic vision – The city viewed through colored lenses, reality transformed
• Communal experience – Strangers walking together through the spectrum

This is a mandala you can walk through, a color-based initiation, a rainbow bridge between earth and sky.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity as Spiritual Practice

Yayoi Kusama (born 1929, Japan) creates Infinity Mirror Rooms—small chambers lined with mirrors and filled with lights, creating the illusion of infinite space.

The Infinity Rooms:

• Mirrored walls, floor, and ceiling – Your reflection multiplies infinitely in all directions
• LED lights or lanterns – Suspended in space, reflected endlessly
• Timed entry – Usually 30-60 seconds alone in the room (like a meditation cell)
• Ego dissolution – The self multiplies and disappears simultaneously
• Cosmic consciousness – You become a point in infinite space, like a star in the universe

Kusama has struggled with mental illness her entire life, experiencing hallucinations of infinite nets and polka dots. Her Infinity Rooms externalize her visions, allowing others to experience what she sees—the dissolution of boundaries, the multiplication of self, the terror and ecstasy of infinity.

She said: "Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity."

The Obliteration Rooms:

Kusama creates all-white rooms (furniture, walls, objects) and gives visitors colored dot stickers to place anywhere. Over days or weeks, the room transforms from white void to polka-dot chaos:

• Participatory ritual – Every visitor contributes to the transformation
• Impermanence – The room is eventually dismantled, like a sand mandala
• Collective creation – Thousands of individual acts creating one artwork
• Obliteration of form – The original objects disappear under dots, boundaries dissolve

This is Buddhist practice made visible: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The dots obliterate distinction, revealing the underlying unity.

Anish Kapoor: The Void as Portal

Anish Kapoor (born 1954, India/UK) creates sculptures and installations that explore the void, the abyss, the space where form dissolves into formlessness.

Descension (2014):

A circular pool of water with a vortex at the center, endlessly spiraling downward:

• Hypnotic rotation – The eye follows the spiral, the mind quiets
• The abyss – The center appears bottomless, a portal to elsewhere
• Sound – The roar of water creates white noise, drowning thought
• Primal fear and fascination – The pull toward the void, the terror of dissolution

This is the Buddhist void, the Kabbalistic Ain Soph (infinite nothingness), the mystic's dark night—made physical, made walkable, made terrifyingly beautiful.

Vantablack Sculptures:

Kapoor uses Vantablack (the blackest substance ever created, absorbing 99.96% of light) to create sculptures that appear as voids, as holes in reality:

• Depth perception fails – The eye can't determine distance or dimension
• Form disappears – The sculpture becomes pure absence
• Existential vertigo – Confronting nothingness triggers primal unease
• The void stares back – Nietzsche's abyss made literal

Kapoor said: "It's not about making an object. It's about making a non-object, a space, a void."

Bill Viola: Video as Spiritual Journey

Bill Viola (1951-2024) created video installations exploring birth, death, and transcendence through slow-motion imagery and immersive environments.

The Crossing (1996):

Two projections on opposite sides of a screen: a man walks toward the camera, then is consumed by fire on one side and water on the other, disappearing completely:

• Elemental purification – Fire and water as alchemical agents
• Ego death – The self consumed, dissolved, obliterated
• Resurrection implied – The cycle can repeat; death isn't final
• Cathedral scale – Projected large in darkened rooms, overwhelming the viewer

The Nantes Triptych (1992):

Three screens: a woman giving birth (left), a man floating underwater (center), an old woman dying (right):

• The cycle of life – Birth, existence, death as simultaneous realities
• Triptych format – Echoing medieval altarpieces, sacred art structure
• Slow motion – Time stretched, making the ordinary sacred
• Meditative viewing – The work unfolds over 30+ minutes, requiring patience

Viola studied Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism, and Islamic Sufism. His installations are visual koans, moving meditations, electronic cathedrals.

The Constant Beneath the Installation

Here's the deeper truth: Turrell's Skyspaces, Gothic cathedrals, and Tibetan stupas are all doing the same thing—using architecture, light, and spatial design to induce altered states of consciousness.

This is Constant Unification: The rose window at Chartres, Turrell's aperture, and the oculus of the Pantheon are all calculating the same invariant principle—that framing the sky transforms perception, that controlled light creates transcendence, that sacred geometry affects consciousness.

Different cultures, different materials, same mathematics.

How Installation Art Creates Sacred Space

Installation artists use the same techniques as temple builders:

• Threshold crossing – You enter a defined space, leaving the ordinary world behind
• Controlled light – Darkness, colored light, or specific illumination alters mood and perception
• Acoustic design – Sound (or silence) shapes the experience
• Scale manipulation – Vast spaces inspire awe; intimate spaces invite introspection
• Disorientation – Mirrors, fog, or darkness dissolve spatial certainty
• Duration – The work requires time, encouraging meditative engagement
• Communal experience – Strangers share the space, creating collective energy

These aren't aesthetic choices—they're consciousness technologies refined over millennia.

Creating Your Own Sacred Installation

You can apply installation principles at any scale:

1. Define the space – Even a corner of a room can become sacred with intention
2. Control the light – Use candles, colored bulbs, or natural light strategically
3. Add sound – Music, nature sounds, or intentional silence
4. Incorporate scent – Incense, essential oils, or flowers engage olfactory memory
5. Use symbolic objects – Crystals, images, natural elements that carry meaning
6. Create a threshold – A curtain, doorway, or marked boundary between ordinary and sacred
7. Design for duration – Make it a space for sitting, meditating, or ritual practice
8. Invite participation – Allow others to add to or interact with the space

Your altar is an installation. Your meditation space is an installation. Any environment you intentionally design for consciousness transformation is installation art.

The Museum as Temple

Museums have become the secular temples of modern culture:

• Pilgrimage sites – People travel to see specific artworks, like visiting shrines
• Reverential behavior – Quiet voices, slow walking, contemplative gazing
• Architectural grandeur – High ceilings, dramatic spaces, monumental scale
• Ritual viewing – Audio guides as liturgy, docents as priests
• Transformative intent – Art is supposed to change you, elevate you, enlighten you

Installation artists recognize this and create works that fulfill the museum's latent sacred function. They're not decorating temples—they're revealing that museums already are temples.

The Shadow Side: Spectacle vs. Substance

Not all installation art is sacred:

• Instagram bait – Designed for photos, not transformation
• Shallow immersion – Sensory overload without spiritual depth
• Commercialization – Infinity rooms as amusement park attractions
• Ego inflation – The artist as guru, the installation as cult

The difference between sacred space and spectacle: intention. Is the work designed to transform consciousness, or just to impress? To create silence, or to generate content?

Conclusion: The Gallery as Gateway

Installation art proves that sacred space isn't about religion—it's about architecture, light, intention, and the willingness to create conditions for transcendence.

You don't need a cathedral. You need a darkened room, some light, and the understanding that space itself can be a spiritual technology.

Turrell, Eliasson, Kusama, Kapoor, and Viola aren't making art about the sacred—they're making the sacred itself, available to anyone who walks through the door.

The temple never left. It just moved into the gallery. And the gallery is open to everyone.

Sacred space isn't where God lives. It's where consciousness wakes up.