Radiating a soft white light, the tunnel beckons passersby to venture inside and take a moment to contemplate life — and the afterlife. Terminal for Tirana, located on the grounds of Mother Teresa University Hospital in Albania, is a permanent installation by Polish contemporary artist Karolina Halatek that embodies her fascination with near-death experiences (NDEs). “I’m deeply interested in the transformation this has on a person’s life,” she says of the phenomenon. “It’s strong, pro-found and permanent.”

Although she has not had an NDE herself, Halatek has spent some 10 years researching recorded instances and ruminating on how
to create “a space where art, spirituality and science intersect.” She has long wanted to do so through a public artwork that would give people a “glimpse of this experience and trigger ideas around it.”

As an artist who uses light as a primary medium, Halatek first developed the Terminal as a temporary piece for Stuttgart Aufstiege (“Ascents”) Light Art Festival in 2016, where its residency was twice extended due to its popularity. From here, the tunnel was transported to sit in front of the Kunsthalle Bremen museum in North Germany, where it stood for another prolonged stint. In 2022, Adela Demetja, independent curator and founder of the Tirana Art Lab, approached Halatek to partake in the “Art in Public Spaces” competition (launched and funded by the Ministry of Economy, Culture and Innovation of Albania), in which her tunnel was one of eight winning projects by Albanian and international artists to be installed throughout the region.

For this iteration of Terminal for Tirana, Halatek worked with the same skilled technicians who built the Stuttgart installation, this time challenged with creating a walkable and luminous sculpture that was durable enough for permanency. Made from polyethylene and measuring six metres long by three metres in diameter, the cylinder has an opaque glossy white exterior and a milky white interior, which serves to diffuse the neon LEDs (100 six-metre-long strips powered by a nearby yet out-of-sight bank of solar panels) that give the tunnel its otherworldly illu-mination. “This is what people see during an NDE; they enter into the purest white light,” Halatek says.

The artist also collaborated with architect and urban designer Dea Buza of local firm Apparat Studio and landscape architect Elian Stefa, who worked to ready the site, a park adjacent to the hospital’s entrance. The two took care to respect the natural surroundings, incorporating three clusters of circular pink granite stools along a meandering pedestrian path while preserving all existing trees, plants and other vegetation.

“The landscape around it creates a different experience than in previous iterations,” says Halatek. “It becomes a way of meditation. The environment has become a part of the work: The essence of the work lies in the experience, and the surroundings help navigate it.”