Visitors to London’s King’s Cross may already have seen a rainbow-coloured artwork suspended in the sky. Dome-shaped with vertical bars like an old-fashioned bird-cage, the IFO (identified Flying Object) by French artist and architect Jacques Rival is set to rise over King’s Cross once a month for the next two years. It will hang over shops, construction sites and pedestrians, but spend most of its time back on earth, allowing people to walk inside and enjoy the swing at its centre.

The IFO forms part of RELAY, a nine-year arts programmme for the King’s Cross redevelopment, the first three years of which are curated by Michael Pinsky and Stéphanie Delcroix. Jacques Rival often works by re-appropriating popular landmarks. For I Love Lyon in 2006, he appropriated an equestrian statue of Louis XIV and enclosed it within a snow dome, a monumental reproduction of the kind of object sophisticates think of as kitsch and children regard as magical.

He did the same last year in Durham, for the successful Lumiere festival, erecting a dome over a controversial statue of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry.

Relay