Carsten Höller, famous for his immersive installations that engage the audience exhibits works that include elements of playgrounds, zoos and amusement parks and are often presented in a pseudo-scientific setting. Höller holds a doctorate in agricultural sciences and worked as a scientist for several years before becoming an artist. His works often reflect his background by evoking scientific practice while not being actual experiments.
The gigantic fly agaric mushrooms, rides, smells and mirrors will greet the visitors, who represent, in the words of the art critic Baldo Hauser, the “real material” of the exhibitions. These dual exhibitions, Reproduction at CC and Behavior at Kunsten, will offer the public a unique opportunity to view a diverse selection of works from across the artist's career – from some of his earliest works to site-specific new installations – and represent a new and promising collaboration between the two Danish art institutions.
The exhibitions, Reproduction at CC and Behavior at Kunsten, will complement each other in terms of both content and form, exploring the human experience and response to the world around us, including art exhibitions. The works in both institutions interrupt and alter our experience and conduct within the exhibitions. “This is pure 'unsaturated art', an art form that lacks objects that contain art, but instead relies on the functions of the artwork to be completed or performed by visitors with the objects available to them.” (Baldo Hauser)
At the CC Höller tackles the topic of reproduction. At the beginning of the sexual reproduction process, mitosis occurs - a division of a mother cell into two identical daughter cells. This principle of division into two units, and the division of divided units again and again, is the basis for the installation in CC's large exhibition space, Hall 1, which will be divided by a custom color created by the artist and based on the same principle of division that applies in case of reproduction. Visitors to this colorful environment can crawl through the eyes of a dice, assemble one of two slow-moving carousels, or play with a giant collage of polyhedral mushrooms. The second part of the exhibition at the CC is based on Höller's infamous Killing Children series from the early 90s, which plays on and contrasts the human need to have children on the one hand and the traumatizing experience of seeing the world on the other through a little girl's eyes.
In Behavior, in Kunsten, Höller explores alternative ways of perceiving our surroundings and especially our ways of viewing art. The exhibition features works that interrupt, transform or alter, in the broadest sense possible, our experiences with art, including works involving light, sound, smells, mirrors and giant fly agaric mushrooms. There will also be the option to stay overnight in the museum on the Revolving Hotel Room, a large rotating bed, or to wear upside-down glasses that reverse vision of the wearer, thus showing the “real world” as depicted on the retina.
