Carsten Höller: Decision

Carsten Höller’s major exhibition at Hayward Gallery will present a wide range of his works, from newly-made pieces that have been especially commissioned, to key early artworks like The Pinocchio Effect (1994) and Upside Down Goggles (1994-ongoing).

It will bring together sculptures, videos, installations and light works that are designed to profoundly re-orientate our awareness of time and space. Decision will immerse its visitors in a series of experimental environments, reflecting Höller’s wide-ranging interest in the nature of consciousness. Many of the works in the exhibition aim to transform the visitors’ physical and mental experience, in ways that lead them to question their habitual perceptions. Often participatory or immersive, these works highlight an individual response; as Höller himself has remarked: “the real material I am working with is people’s experience.”

As indicated by its title, decision-making will be a focus of the exhibition. Visitors to the Hayward Gallery show will constantly need to reflect on the choices and decisions they make, beginning with how they enter the gallery: two separate entrances will be available, each providing a different route through the first part of the exhibition. Pill Clock (2011–15), a ceiling-mounted timepiece that will drop over one million pills onto the gallery floor during the course of the exhibition, poses a different kind of conundrum for visitors: the installation includes a drinking fountain for those visitors who decide to take one of the pills and face its unknown effects. Other highlights of the show include Flying Mushrooms (2015), a new large-scale work of an upside-down mobile with giant psychedelic mushrooms; Moving Beds (2015), a pair of robotic beds that restlessly roam the galleries like ‘insomniac twins’; Flying Machines (2008/2015) installed on one of the Hayward’s outdoor terraces, opposite Waterloo Bridge, offering visitors the sensation of soaring above city traffic; whilst The Pinocchio Effect (1994) will, through an ingenious use of a simple technology, give visitors the uncanny sensation that their nose is growing.

Throughout the exhibition, recurring motifs of doubles, twins, forking paths and mirrored reflections will lead visitors to question how they go about choosing between things that on the surface, at least, seem almost identical. The exhibition will climax by confronting visitors with a final choice between several dramatic ways to exit Hayward Gallery, including climbing up through the gallery’s glass pyramid roof lights and descending via Höller’s new Isomeric Slides (2015). Built onto the gallery’s exterior wall, these sinuous slides will constitute a graceful sculptural installation whilst at the same time, as the artist notes, the work will be a device for “experiencing an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness.”

10 June – 6 September 2015
Carsten Höller
Decision
curated by Ralph Rugoff
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road, London