10 Iconic Installation Artworks of the 21st Century

Installation art — the medium that turned museum halls into weather systems, buildings deserts into boutiques, and buildings into a heap of chairs — rewrote the terms on which audiences relate to spaces, and in doing so produced some of the most powerful and some of the most vapid work of the century, often indistinguishably. The following ten works gathered here are firmly in the first camp. They became iconic not because they were large or spectacular — though several were both — but because they used space, time, and material to make arguments that could not have been made any other way.

1. Wim Delvoye — Cloaca Original (2000)

Wim Delvoye (b. 1965, Belgian) has long been drawn to the decorative, the scatological, and the perverse, but Cloaca Original — first presented at the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (MuHKA) in 2000 — remains one of his most uncompromising and conceptually ruthless statements. The machine is a full-scale mechanical simulation of the human digestive system: a series of glass containers, pumps, tubes, and chemical processes that, fed real food twice daily by a team of technicians, processes, digests, and eventually defecates, producing waste that Delvoye vacuum-sealed and sold as art — something Piero Manzoni would have enjoyed.

The work’s provocation operates on several levels simultaneously. As a critique of the art market’s appetite for commodifying anything, it is almost too literal — here, the body is a factory, and its output, however abject, is assigned value by institutional context alone. As a meditation on labor, it implicates its own maintenance staff, who appeared in lab coats to feed the machine each day as though conducting a solemn ritual. And as a formal object, it is genuinely spectacular: a gleaming, industrial apparatus that looks like it belongs in a pharmaceutical plant, not a museum. That Cloaca required a team of scientists and engineers to design and operate only deepened its satirical charge. The vacuum-packed excrement was sold at prices that rose with the machine’s renown, and the work traveled internationally in various iterations. The franchise logic was itself part of the joke — albeit an iconic one.

2. Martin Creed — Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off (2000)

Martin Creed (b. 1968, British) won the Turner Prize in 2001 for a work consisting of exactly what its title describes: the lights in an empty room switching on and off at five-second intervals. Nothing else. The scandal that followed — the tabloid outrage, the questions in Parliament, the visitor who threw eggs at the gallery walls — was itself part of what the work produced, forcing a public confrontation with the most basic questions about art’s definition, legitimacy, and institutional framing that the Turner Prize had ever generated. For many, it confirmed every suspicion about contemporary art’s emptiness; for others, it was a precise and elegant demonstration that context, attention, and duration are sufficient conditions for aesthetic experience.

Work No. 227 belongs to a rigorous and consistent practice in which Creed has consistently pushed against the assumption that art must add something to the world — that it must fill space, produce objects, or make statements. The lights belong to this broader endeavor of asking what the minimum conditions of art might be, and what we notice when everything else is stripped away. That the answer turned out to be the room itself — its size, its quality of light, the slight anxiety of the dark interval — is, on reflection, not a trivial finding at all.

3. Yayoi Kusama — Fireflies on the Water (2002)

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Japanese) has been making mirror rooms since the 1960s, pioneering immersive installation, culminating in arguably one of her most iconic iterations in 2002 with Fireflies on the Water — the work in which the logic of infinite reflection arguably reached its most luminous, emotionally overwhelming, and formally resolved form. The installation places the viewer alone on a small platform suspended over a shallow pool in a darkened room whose walls and ceiling are lined entirely with mirrors. One hundred and fifty small lights hang at varying heights above and around the platform, their reflections multiplying in the mirrored surfaces and the water below into what appears to be an infinite field of soft, coloured illumination — stars, or fireflies, extending in every direction without limit.

Kusama has described her mirror rooms as expressions of her lifelong experience of self-obliteration — a condition she calls infinity nets — in which the boundaries of the self dissolve into a surrounding pattern. She has lived with this condition since childhood, seeking treatment and also making it the central subject of her art, across decades and media that include painting, sculpture, performance, fashion, and installation. The work has been shown at major institutions worldwide and has become one of the most sought-after and reproduced installations of the century, inspiring a wave of participatory mirror environments by other artists that have never quite matched it.

4. Olafur Eliasson — The Weather Project (2003)

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1969, Danish-Icelandic) filled the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern with an artificial sun in the winter of 2003–04, and the result became one of the most visited and discussed installations in the history of the institution. The Weather Project consisted of a semicircular disc of mono-frequency lamps — yellow light that strips all other color from the space and skin — backed by a vast mirror suspended from the ceiling that doubled the hall and its occupants into an infinite, hazy sky. Mist machines introduced a fine atmospheric vapor. Over two million people saw the work during its run, and their collective behavior in the space — the spontaneous lying down, the silence, the apparent need to return — became as much a subject of discussion as the work itself.

Eliasson’s practice has long been concerned with the construction of natural phenomena in artificial environments: how light, water, and weather are perceived and what happens when the conditions of that perception are made visible. The Weather Project pushed this inquiry to an institutional and public scale it had not previously reached. It arrived at a precise cultural moment — the early years of serious mainstream anxiety about climate change — and turned a former industrial building into something between a cathedral and a weather system. That it achieved this while remaining rigorously formal and conceptually precise, without resolving into sentiment, is what separates it from the many immersive spectacles it has indirectly inspired. Of all the extraordinary commissions the Turbine Hall has hosted, The Weather Project is the one that has never quite been surpassed.

5. Doris Salcedo — Untitled (8th International Istanbul Biennial, 2003)

Doris Salcedo (b. 1958, Colombian) has spent her career making art about absence, violence, and the accumulated weight of historical trauma, and her contribution to the 2003 Istanbul Biennial was among her most spatially and conceptually audacious works. Working in the gap between two adjacent buildings in the city, Salcedo inserted 1,550 wooden chairs into the space — stacked, wedged, and suspended in a dense column that rose several stories between the facades, visible from the street below. The chairs were sourced from Istanbul’s flea markets and second-hand dealers, each one carrying the residue of ordinary domestic life: wear, repair, the memory of the bodies that had sat in them.

The chair is one of the most charged of domestic objects in Salcedo’s practice — a signifier of presence, of gathering, of the space held open for someone who has not yet arrived, or who will not arrive. Massed in this way and displaced from any interior, stacked until the column feels like an archaeological deposit of human life, they became a monument to the disappeared, to the unnamed, to the sheer accumulative weight of anonymous loss. Salcedo works primarily in response to the specific political violence of Colombia — the paramilitary killings, the forced disappearances, the terror of everyday life under armed conflict — but the Istanbul piece refused the specificity of any single event or country, placing grief at an architectural and almost geological scale.

6. Anselm Kiefer — The Seven Heavenly Palaces (2004–2015)

I was expecting to see Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945, German) in our segment with the greatest paintings since 2000, but the iconic permanent installation in a former industrial space in Milan, titled The Seven Heavenly Palaces, is simply such an architecturally ambitious and materially dense installation that one cannot ignore. Seven concrete towers, each between 14 and 18 meters tall, rise from the floor of the hangar. Their surfaces are embedded with steel rods, lead books, broken glass, dried flowers, photographic images, and fragments of text. They are simultaneously ruins and monuments, ancient structures and recent constructions, sacred architectures and industrial waste. It also makes me wonder whether this work is an exhibition of paintings and sculptures or a permanent installation, although that distinction matters only categorically and feels utterly irrelevant when walking through it.

The towers take their name from the Hekhalot — an ancient body of Jewish mystical literature, likely composed between the third and seventh centuries, describing the palaces through which the soul ascends toward divine presence. Kiefer has drawn on Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and the theology of catastrophe throughout his practice, always in tension with the specific history of twentieth-century Germany: the Holocaust, the question of what culture survives destruction, and the even harder question of what it means that it does. In The Seven Heavenly Palaces, those concerns are given their most monumental architectural form. The installation was expanded and deepened over a decade, with new towers and elements added between 2004 and 2015 as an accumulation of matter and lingering thought. It remains permanently installed at the Pirelli HangarBicocca and is widely regarded as one of the defining achievements of Kiefer’s late career.

7. Elmgreen & Dragset — Prada Marfa (2005)

Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Danish) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Norwegian) installed a permanent, functioning replica of a Prada boutique in the West Texas desert in 2005, and created what may be the most photographed artwork of the century. The building is stocked with actual Prada products from the autumn/winter 2005 collection — shoes and handbags selected by Miuccia Prada herself — sealed shut, and left to the landscape. It is never opened. The products inside were treated with anti-degradation measures to ensure they would remain visible through the windows indefinitely, but the building itself was allowed to weather, crack, and settle into the desert floor at its own pace.

Sited on Route 90 between Marfa and Valentine, Texas, miles from the nearest town, Prada Marfa strips the boutique of every context that makes it legible — the city, the street, the customer, the transaction — leaving only the brand itself: a logo, a set of windows, an architecture of luxury desire set against scrubland and sky. The work arrived at the precise moment when the art world’s entanglement with high fashion was becoming impossible to ignore, and it turned that entanglement into a landscape, a monument, and a joke simultaneously. That it has since been repeatedly vandalized, legally contested by the state of Texas on sign ordinance grounds, and endlessly circulated on social media and in music videos has only compounded its cultural footprint.

8. Ai Weiwei — Sunflower Seeds (2010)

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Chinese) filled the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern with 100 million individually hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds for his Unilever Series commission in 2010. Each seed was made and hand-painted by a team of over 1,600 artisans in Jingdezhen — the city in Jiangxi Province that has been the center of Chinese porcelain production for over a thousand years — and the 150-tonne mass spread across the hall floor in a grey expanse that appeared, from the upper levels, like a single continuous surface. Only close inspection revealed the individuality of each piece: the slight differences in color, shape, and brushwork that marked each seed as a distinct handmade object.

The work operates on several registers simultaneously. Obviously, it is a meditation on mass production and the erasure of individual labor within it: the seeds look industrial but are not. It is a commentary on Chinese manufacturing, political conformity, and the suppression of individual identity — the sunflower carries specific historical weight in China, where it was used as a symbol of Maoist devotion, the masses turning toward their leader as flowers turn toward the sun. When Tate initially invited visitors to walk across the seeds and was subsequently forced to prohibit it due to concerns about ceramic dust, the restriction itself became part of the work’s meaning. The question of what can and cannot be touched, held, owned, or censored was already Ai Weiwei’s subject — and would become more urgent when he was detained by Chinese authorities the following year.

9. Christian Boltanski — Personnes (2010)

Christian Boltanski (1944–2021, French) was invited to occupy the Grand Palais in Paris for Monumenta 2010, and the installation he created there — Personnes, a word meaning both “persons” and “nobody” in French — was among the most affecting works of his career and one of the defining large-scale installations of the century. The entire nave of the Grand Palais, one of the most magnificent public interiors in Europe, was covered with hundreds of mounds of used clothing arranged in a grid across the floor. The garments — coats, shirts, dresses, children’s clothes — had been collected from donations and second-hand markets, and they carried the residue of real bodies: wear, staining, repair, the shapes pressed into them by use. At the centre of the space, a large mechanical crane moved slowly above the largest single pile, periodically grasping handfuls of garments and lifting them before releasing them again in an endless, arbitrary cycle of selection and return.

The reference to the Holocaust was unmistakable — to the piles of clothing left at the camps, to the arbitrary logic of selection, to the reduction of persons to material — and Boltanski rarely felt the need to name it directly. What he understood, and what Personnes made viscerally present, was that the scale of the Grand Palais could transform mourning into something almost geological in its weight: a field of anonymous human lives, accumulated until they became a landscape. The crane’s indifferent selection — lifting and dropping, over and over, without logic or purpose — gave the work an unbearable intimacy alongside its monumentality. Personnes was seen by over 100,000 visitors during its run. Boltanski went on to describe it as one of the works he was most satisfied with in a career spanning five decades. It remains one of the most powerful responses to historical atrocity that installation art has produced.

10. Marta Minujín — The Parthenon of Books (2017)

Marta Minujín (b. 1943, Argentine) first built a Parthenon from banned books in Buenos Aires in 1983, the year Argentina returned to democracy after years of military dictatorship. For documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017, she rebuilt it — at full scale, on the Friedrichsplatz, using 100,000 books that had been banned somewhere in the world at some point in history. The books were donated by readers, publishers, libraries, and institutions from across the globe, each one individually wrapped in transparent plastic and hung from a steel scaffold constructed in the exact proportions of the Athenian original. The structure rose to 19 metres and could be seen from across the city.

Site and concept are powerfully intertwined. It was on the Friedrichsplatz that the Nazis burned books in 1933, in one of the most deliberate and symbolic acts of cultural destruction of the twentieth century. To rebuild the Parthenon — the architectural emblem of democratic civilization and rational inquiry — from the very objects that authoritarian regimes most reliably destroy, on the very site where that destruction was enacted, it is safe to say that this ambitious installation is not relying on mere scale or spectacle. At the close of documenta 14, the scaffold was dismantled, and the books were removed and redistributed freely to the public: the monument taken down, the library restored and dispersed. As a result, its monumental and participatory nature — requiring the worldwide collection and physical donation of books — gave the work a collective dimension that conceptual logic alone could never have achieved, producing an iconic synergy that makes it one of the greatest installation artworks to date, in every sense of the word.

Last Updated on June 22, 2026