ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo has commissioned the artist Olafur Eliasson to build a deep sea installation inside the rotunda of its rebuilt Aquarium. The work is called Deep seeing currents, the zoo announced it on July 14, 2026, and it opens to visitors on October 3, 2026.
The premise is unusual for a zoo. There are no animals in it. The rotunda is the domed heart of a building from 1882, and for a few minutes it becomes a place almost nobody has been: the deep ocean, rendered in darkness, sound, vibration and light.
What the installation does
Eliasson described the experience in ARTIS’s announcement, which the zoo published in English as well as Dutch.
As you approach Deep seeing currents, you are slowly enveloped by darkness and the sounds of life underwater, layers of oceanic cacophony, whale songs, rumbling of hydrothermal vents, and human-made noises, among others. The vibrations can be felt throughout your entire body, emulating the experience of pressure in the deep sea. Above and around you, lights flash and seem to descend like the hypnotic circulation of marine snow, the organic and inorganic particles essential to life in the deep sea.
Marine snow is the working detail there. It is the steady fall of dead plankton, fecal pellets and mineral fragments from the sunlit surface into water that never sees light, and it is the food supply that makes deep sea life possible at all. Eliasson is using it as the visual motif, which means the piece is built around the actual mechanism rather than an impression of one.
He also explained the choice to take sight away first.
I believe that limiting one sense can help us unlock the other senses, which is key to conjuring this unimaginable environment.
Why a zoo commissioned an artist
ARTIS says the work connects art, science and nature, and that it fits the argument the new Aquarium is built to make: that everything on Earth is connected to water, from the deepest ocean to daily life on land.
That is a harder case to make with tanks alone. An aquarium can show a reef, a kelp forest or a river. It cannot show the abyss, because almost nothing from four thousand meters down survives being brought up, and the animals that live there cannot be kept. An installation is one of the few honest ways to put a visitor inside that habitat.
The work was made possible in part by the Mondriaan Fonds, the Dutch public fund for visual art and cultural heritage.
The building it sits in
The ARTIS Aquarium is a national monument dating from 1882 and one of the oldest aquariums still operating anywhere. It reopened to the public on June 13, 2026 after years of restoration, in a ceremony led by Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema and ARTIS director Rembrandt Sutorius.
ARTIS describes the result as a museum environment as much as an aquarium, where architecture, installations, science and art are meant to work together. The Eliasson commission is the first major test of that claim.
What ARTIS did not say
The announcement gives no cost for the commission, no closing date, no dimensions for the piece and no capacity for the rotunda. It does not say whether entry is included in general admission or timed separately, and it does not name the sound sources used in the composition.
Those are ordinary omissions in an arts announcement made ten weeks ahead of opening, and they are worth flagging rather than filling in.
A busy year in Amsterdam
This is the second significant ARTIS project in as many months. In August the zoo said it would rebuild its California sea lion enclosure as a deep-water habitat for Critically Endangered African penguins, with 110 separate nest sites. Both projects are conversions of existing structures rather than new ground, which is the shape almost every expansion takes at a zoo founded in 1838 inside a European city.
The pattern is not unique to Amsterdam. Aquarium Berlin reopened in August after a three-year modernization of a building that first opened in 1913.
Source: ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo, July 14, 2026. Quotations are ARTIS’s own English text, not our translation of the Dutch version.
Quick answers
- What is Deep seeing currents?
A multisensory installation by Olafur Eliasson commissioned for the rotunda of the ARTIS-Aquarium in Amsterdam. It uses darkness, sound, vibration and light to put visitors inside the deep sea. It opens October 3, 2026.
- Are there animals in it?
No. It is an artwork, not an exhibit. ARTIS says the point is to make an environment physically conceivable that an aquarium cannot show with tanks, because deep sea animals cannot be brought up or kept.
- What is marine snow, and why is it in the piece?
The steady fall of dead plankton, fecal pellets and mineral particles from the sunlit surface into the deep, which is the food supply that makes deep sea life possible. Eliasson uses it as the visual motif of the installation.
- What did ARTIS not say?
The announcement gives no cost for the commission, no closing date, no dimensions, no rotunda capacity, and does not say whether entry is included in general admission.
