Carsten Höller / Belgium b.1961 / Left/Right Slide 2010 / Stainless steel, polycarbonate and rubber mats / Commissioned 2010 with a special allocation from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Carsten Höller / Photograph: QAGOMA

Carsten Höller
Left/right slide 2010

Not Currently on Display

Our experience is the primary ‘material’ Carsten Höller manipulates as an artist. He aims to alter how we perceive the world and spark the senses in new ways. Inspired by his work as a biologist, Höller uses the museum to make scientific and philosophical experiments that reshape our expectations about art and produce unexpected outcomes.

To slide is to experience ‘a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’, says Höller recalling the words of sociologist Roger Caillois, eliciting ‘an emotional state somewhere between delight and madness’. The sensations generated by sliding are central to his work and we are invited to observe our own experience of fear, anticipation and excitement as we hurtle through space.

Before travelling in Left/Right Slide we must decide between two possible paths: left or right. What does our decision say about us? Are left and right separate, or part of a single whole? What might our choice reveal about our broader approach to the world? Are we left or right handed? Are our political associations with the left or the right? What meaning do these dichotomies really have?

Born in 1961 in Brussels to German parents, Carsten Höller worked as a biologist before becoming an artist. His art works might be thought of as experiments that act on the viewer in surprising ways. He has stated that experience is the ‘material’ that he uses to create works that alter the viewer’s sensory perception, behaviour and sense of order or logic. Höller currently lives and works from Stockholm and Biriwa, Ghana.


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