Carsten Höller

Carsten Höller applies scientific curiosity to his work as an artist, exploring human behavior, perception, and altered states of consciousness with playful, sometimes unsettling humor. Many of the projects that comprise his self-described “laboratory of doubt”—which range from twisting slides to vision-flipping goggles—incorporate disorienting, even hallucinatory experiences that prompt viewers to question how they see and understand the world around them. Born in 1961 in Brussels to German parents, Höller began to make art in the late 1980s alongside a number of artists experimenting with space and experience such as Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Andrea Zittel. After studying olfactory communication in insects at the University of Kiel, where he received a doctorate in agricultural science in 1988, and working as a research entomologist, he returned to art making full-time in 1993. Höller is often associated with relational aesthetics, a strategy, named by curator Nicolas Bourriaud in 1996, focused on human exchange and social context. Among Höller’s early interactive projects are Flugmaschine ( Flying Machine ) (1996), a motorized steel armature to which viewers are attached before being hoisted through the air, and Giant Psycho Tank (1999), a sensory-deprivation chamber that facilitates a sensation of being bodiless. For the 1998 Berlin Biennale, Höller initiated what was to become his defining body of work, a succession of giant tubular slides that transform users’ experience of the buildings through which they move. In 2000 he installed a slide in the Milan office of designer Miuccia Prada, and in 2006 he constructed Test Site , a set of five slides in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. Höller is interested in the structures’ imposition of a temporary loss of control on participants, describing the resultant emotional state as “somewhere between delight and madness.” Höller has also worked with other objects and mechanisms associated with entertainment and play. Amusement Park (2006), a major installation at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, featured full-size carnival rides that operate at dramatically slowed speeds, an unexpected modification that converts them into kinetic sculptures, profoundly altering their character. In 2014, Höller installed Golden Mirror Carousel at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Completing just one rotation every five minutes, this gleaming structure similarly encourages viewers to consider the artificially accelerated pace of not only fairground diversions but also of contemporary life. Other of Höller’s installations have focused on the physical and psychological reconfiguration of social environments. The Double Club (2008–09) was a functional installation designed to establish a conversation between Congolese and Western culture in the context of a London bar, restaurant, and nightclub. Large rotating glass discs comprised Revolving Hotel Room , another altered space that changed the layout and function of an interior of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, repurposing it as an operating hotel room during the 2008–09 group exhibition theanyspacewhatever . Finally, Höller’s scientific background resurfaces in his many works featuring or representing animals and plants. Singing Canaries Mobile (2009) incorporates seven cages housing live canaries (one of the various species of bird that the artist keeps in his Stockholm home), while numerous of his works since the early 1990s have involved mushrooms. Upside Down Mushroom Room , which was installed at Fondazione Prada, Milan, in 2000, included large sculptures of fungi attached to the gallery ceiling, while Giant Triple Mushrooms (2010), shown in Höller’s 2011 survey exhibition Experience at the New Museum, New York, was a set of Alice in Wonderland –like replicas of psychotropic mushrooms. And in animal sculptures such as Octopus (2014) and Pangolin (2022), Höller considers our relation to different species by distorting their natural forms and colors.