Carsten Höller: Decision is the artist’s largest survey show in the UK to date. Immersing visitors in a series of experimental environments, Höller’s interactive exhibition explores perception and decision making. To enter the exhibition visitors must choose between two different entrances, behind which lie separate routes through the first gallery. Once inside the exhibition, visitors encounter a range of situations – including the invitation to consume a pill, contents unknown – that ask them to reflect on the process of decision making.
Over the past 20 years Holler has created devices, vehicles and situations that alter visitors’ physical and psychological states. Carsten Höller: Decision offers visitors the chance to see the world upside-down, experience uncanny bodily sensations and soar above London’s traffic in a flying machine. Hoping to ‘induce hallucinations, in the widest sense’ Höller populates the gallery with disorientating objects and installations, including giant revolving mushrooms and two robotically-engineered beds that – day and night – roam the exhibition like a pair of restless, insomniac twins.
Carsten Höller: Decision culminates in the artist’s Isomeric Slides. Accessed from Hayward Gallery’s roof, these slides turn ordinary gallery activity on its head. In a setting usually reserved for contemplation, Höller’s slides are an invitation to lose control. A slide, Höller has remarked, is both ‘a sculpture that you can travel inside’ and a ‘device for experiencing a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness’.
Wednesday 10 June – Sunday 6 September 2015
Opening times
Sunday 30 August - 10:00-22:00
Monday 31 August - 11:00-21:00
Tuesday 1 September - 11:00-21:00
Wednesday 2 September - 11:00-21:00
Thursday 3 September - 11:00-22:00
Friday 4 September - 11:00-22:00
Saturday 5 September - 10:00-22:00
Sunday 6 September - 10:00-22:00
This exhibition invites visitors to participate in ways that may not be accessible to all and some exhibits are subject to weather. Please check restrictions before booking.
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Image: Carsten Höller, Dice (White Body, Black Dots), 2014, Half Mirror Room, 2008/2015, Snake, 2014, and Reflections On Her Eyes, Reflections On My Eyes, 1996/2015 © Carsten Höller. Installation view Carsten Höller: Decision, Hayward Gallery, London, 2015. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian Gallery, Air de Paris, Paris, and Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Brussels. Photo © Linda Nylind