He exhibited a flickering light to win the Turner prize. Now Martin Creed is to send a group of athletes running around Tate Britain Gallery in his latest effort to stretch the definition of art.

The “exhibit”, which will probably have a number rather than a name, will be on show from the end of June until the autumn and is similar to works Creed has staged in Italy and America.

Hundreds of runners will be recruited from athletics clubs across Britain for the show at the gallery in central London.

The Tate was reticent this weekend about whether the work signified anything, but the Italian version was described in its exhibition brochure as “a metaphor for the capacity to build art out of nothing”.

Creed, 40, born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, was referred to by one critic as “tailor of the emperor’s new clothes”.

He won the 2001 Turner prize with what he called Work No 227, The Lights Going On and Off. He arranged for the lights in an empty room to flicker on and off every five seconds, but the whitewalled exhibition space was bare.

Many asked if it was art at all and the artist Jacqueline Crofton threw eggs at the walls of the space to protest. It was also noted that the installation was almost identical to a 1976 work by the Italian artist Gino Valle.

Creed’s athletes will run continuous circuits of the Tate’s 270ft Duveen Gallery in relays of about 15 minutes. The show is the first in what will become an annual Duveen exhibition, which will be sponsored by Sotheby’s, the auctioneers.

The previous incarnations of the work have had slight variations. At the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan in 2006, men and women ran around a piano in a room set up as a night club. And in the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annadale-on-Hudson, New York state, last year, gallery assistants ran through the rooms on a 10-minute course.

Although Tate Britain is best known for its historic collections, it has also shown numerous contemporary installations.

They include last year’s State Britain, in which the artist Mark Wallinger recreated the ramshackle peace camp of the protester Brian Haw outside parliament.

Creed will at least be sparing Tate Britain’s visitors some of his more extreme art. His American exhibition last year included two videos in which a person walked in front of a camera trained on an empty white wall and floor, and then vomited before walking away. Some reviewers took it seriously. A New York Times critic commented that Creed was “a very late conceptualist with no bias against objects, and a devotee of the rarefied art-in-the-street tendency of situationism whose favourite situation seems to be the white cube of a gallery”. It was not immediately clear whether or not this was praise.

Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, said of the new Creed: “I do not choose works in order to generate controversy.”

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