Belgian artist Carsten Höller has turned a contemporary art museum in Berlin into a zoo! 24 canaries, 12 reindeers, eight mice and two flies, are what visitors to the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art will be lining up to observe this month.

Höller’s installation, named Soma, is inspired by the myth of a magical drink. According to the beliefs of Vedic nomads in northern India in the second millennium BC, soma gave those who drank it special powers and brought them closer to their gods. Nobody knows what went into the drink, though some research suggests that soma may have contained fly-agaric mushrooms — Amanita muscaria — a poisonous, red-capped mushroom which has hallucinogenic effects.

But Carsten Höller has not always been an artist. To begin with he studied agricultural science in Kiel, Germany and habilitated 1993 in Phytopathology. Parallel to his work as a scientist he began his artistic career and integrated the experiment as a method into his artistic work.

The animals are part of an installation by Belgian artist Carsten Höller. The installation, named Soma, is inspired by the myth of a magical drink.

Höller’s work is all about encouraging contemplation of questions such as: “How do we achieve enlightenment? What role is science given in our society, and what role myth?”

Upside Down Mushroom Room, 2000
Exhibited at Fondazione Prada Milan

Carsten Höller holds a doctorate in biology, and he uses his training as a scientist in his work as an artist, concentrating particularly on the nature of human relationships. Viewer participation is the key to all of Höller’s sculptures, but it is less an end in itself than a vehicle to informally test the artist’s theories concerning human perception and physiological reactions.

Test Site, 2006.
Installation view ‘Unilever Series : Carsten Höller’, Turbine Hall
Tate Modern, London 2006.

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

Mirror Carousel, 2005.
Installation view, « Logic », Gagosian, London, 2005.

Tate Modern Interview