Carsten Höller

Carsten Höller, born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1961, is a German artist whose practice brings together scientific methods, psychological enquiry and participatory experiences. Born to German parents working for the European Economic Community, he grew up in Brussels. He currently lives and works in Stockholm. Höller initially pursued a scientific career, earning a doctorate in agricultural science from the University of Kiel in 1988, with a specialisation in the olfactory communication of insects. His dissertation, “Efficiency Analysis of the Parasitoids of Cereal Aphids,” laid the foundations for his sustained engagement with biology, experimentation and perception. After working as a research entomologist, he devoted himself fully to art in 1993. Höller’s transition from science to art developed out of his scientific curiosity and experimental approach. His work brings the two fields together to investigate human perception, sensory mechanisms and the relationships among mind, body and environment. His scientific background is evident in installations structured as experiments or propositions, in which visitors are invited to participate both physically and psychologically. During the 1990s, his work became associated with the participatory practices that came to be discussed in relation to Relational Aesthetics, alongside those of artists including Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija. One of Höller’s best-known projects is Test Site (2006–2007), commissioned for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London. The installation consisted of five large tubular slides connecting different levels of the museum and invited visitors to experience the architecture through speed, movement and temporary loss of control. In 2008, Höller opened The Double Club in a former Victorian warehouse in London. Commissioned by Fondazione Prada and operating until July 2009, the project combined a bar, restaurant and nightclub, with its spaces, cuisine and music divided between Congolese and Western cultural traditions. Rather than simply blending the two, the project placed them in a deliberately structured dialogue. In 2010, Höller presented SOMA at the Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. The installation included reindeer, canaries, mice, flies and oversized mushroom sculptures and explored the disputed identity of soma, a ritual drink described in ancient Vedic texts. Taking as its point of departure a theory connecting soma to fly agaric mushrooms and their consumption by reindeer, the project examined the boundaries between scientific experimentation, mythology and altered states of consciousness. Höller has also developed numerous functional slide sculptures in public and institutional settings. His Aventura Slide Tower, a site-specific structure standing approximately 93 feet high, opened at Aventura Mall near Miami in 2018. Combining a viewing platform with a functioning slide, it exemplifies his interest in making bodily experience, exhilaration and uncertainty integral to an encounter with art. His work frequently employs devices such as mushrooms, mirrors, rotating structures and sensory-altering environments to produce disorientation, uncertainty and heightened physical awareness. These projects are conceived not merely to be observed but to be activated: visitors become participants whose decisions and bodily responses help shape their experience of the work. More recent projects include Giant Triple Mushroom (2024), a three-metre-high aluminium sculpture presented at Place Vendôme at Place Vendôme for Art Basel Paris. The work combines enlarged sections of three different mushroom species, including the fly agaric. Höller’s engagement with food also led to Brutalisten, a Stockholm restaurant opened in 2022 and based on his long-term Brutalist Kitchen project. By combining scientific structures with playful and destabilising experiences, Höller invites participants to reconsider perception, behaviour and decision-making. His work transforms the exhibition space into a testing ground in which curiosity, pleasure, confusion and unease can coexist.