Carsten Höller – Stockholm Slides (2025)

Carsten Höller was born 1961 in Belgium to German parents. He has lived in Sweden for the past 25 years, and more recently also in Ghana and in Italy. He has a background as a researcher and defended his thesis on the way insects communicate through scent, before he completely transitioned to artistic work in the early 1990s.

“Influential environments”

Carsten Höller is known for creating participatory artworks that blur the boundary between scientific experiment and sensory play. For almost four decades, he has created site-specific, experimental sculptures in which the viewer becomes active in the exploration of consciousness.

By disrupting habitual approaches to the body, space and consciousness, the artworks create new ways for the participant to experience both the work and themselves.

The artist describes his works as “influential environments” – installations that evoke specific states of mind such as exhilaration, disorientation, doubt, joy and fear.

Rides in mirrored choreography

Various types of slides have been part of Carsten Höller’s artistic production since 1998 and have been installed permanently or temporarily in a large number of locations around Europe and the USA.

Both slides in “Stockholm Slides” are about 39 metres long and identical, but mirrored. One turns clockwise and the other counterclockwise. The drop height is 15 metres, from the museum’s roof down to Slupskjulsvägen on the building’s sea side. Two people can ride at the same time, as in a mirrored choreography.

The downward movement that the rider finds themselves in not only activates the body, but also triggers an emotional and cognitive dynamic: When we give in to gravity, a regulated state of loss of control is created where strong emotions such as fear and delight coexist.

“Voluptuous panic …”

Although only two people can ride “Stockholm Slides” at the same time, their reactions can rub off on passers-by as well as on the guests at the museum restaurant, as they whiz past along its windows.

Carsten Höller describes the experience of riding the slide as a controlled fall, a state of “voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind” – borrowing from the sociologist Roger Caillois.

“Stockholm Slides” in the Moderna Museet Collection

“Stockholm Slides” is part of the Moderna Museet Collection and is an artwork with a building permit valid for five years at a time.

Director Gitte Ørskou has been in a dialogue with Carsten Höller for many years, which has, among things, resulted in the realisation of the new artwork on the Moderna Museet façade.

– “Stockholm Slides” can change the conception of what a museum visit is and can entail, both for the audience who actively uses it and for those who watch others ride. Right from the beginning, we were clear that it would be an artwork that would activate the audience in a concrete way and have a permanent and prominent place, she says.