Carsten Höller at Luma Arles

'Isometric Slides' 2021 by #carstenholler is one of the artist's two new permanent works installed at Luma Arles.

'For those who've never ridden a slide before, they have a specificity to them; the experience of riding any one slide is particular to that slide. When I discovered this, I started constructing slides that were almost identical, but inverse mirrors of each other, and which have remarkably different effects—they not only bring you to a different place, but the feeling each inspires is slightly different; an inkling of the possibilities they hold. 

As we hurtle ever deeper into the Anthropocene, itself a concept many of our leaders have yet to fully grasp, we'll have to challenge more and more of our assumptions. The slides I construct in my work are art objects—with them, I hope to inspire, to induce questioning, to recalibrate a person's understanding and experience of their self. The madness of a slide, that "voluptuous panic," is a kind of joy. It is an experience with value far beyond the confines of a museum, or a playground. It might be time, for all our sakes, to begin to explore exactly how far that might be.'