Carsten Höller’s Slide Madness Comes to London

Carsten Höller, Installation view at Tate Modern, London, UK © Tate Photography via the Gagosian Gallery

The Belgian artist Carsten Höller’s upcoming retrospective at London’s Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery will feature two of his popular slides, the BBC reports (see Höller to Taker Over the Hayward Gallery).

A similar installation complete with five slides was featured at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2006, and at the Swiss furniture company Vitra’s headquarters (see Carsten Höller Unleashes 100-Foot-Tall Slide on Vitra Campus).

The major survey exhibition titled Decision will feature works spanning the artist’s 20-year career. It sets out to encourages visitors to consider the consequences of their life decisions and to reflect on how past choices have impacted their present reality.

In accordance with the theme of making choices, the exhibition will force visitors to choose once before entering, and once again before leaving the show: The gallery has been outfitted with two separate entrances and visitors also have the option of exiting via one of two of the artist’s shiny slides.

Höller told the BBC that the slides would hopefully make visitors experience “an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness.”

Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, said Höller was “one of the world’s most thought-provoking and profoundly playful artists, with a sharp and mischievous intelligence bent on turning our ‘normal’ view of things upside-down.”

The exhibition, he added “will ask visitors to make choices, but also, more importantly, to embrace a kind of double vision that takes in competing points of view, and embodies what Höller calls a state of ‘active uncertainty’–a frame of mind conducive to entertaining new possibilities.”

Carsten Höller Decision runs from June 10 to September 6 at the Hayward Gallery, London.


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