Talk Art

We meet artist Carsten Höller for some perceptual playtime to celebrate New Year's Day! We explore Höller’s collection of odd tasks and mischievous game-play.

Carsten Höller invites readers to disrupt their daily lives with 336 mind-expanding diversions. They can be played alone, in pairs or in teams, in the street, in bed, on a train, wherever. No props or materials are needed. Just one body, all senses and a willingness to try something new, that’s possibly conceptually or physically challenging, but guaranteed to entertain and to widen the player’s horizons.

Some games are more obviously daring than others – unexpectedly shouting ‘bang!’ when your driver’s reversing into a parking space is sure to elicit a reaction – but that’s absolutely the point. Other games involve covertly dropping strange phrases into conversation, executing somersaults (without practice), or plucking hairs from your opponent’s head while they stay poker-faced.

Höller’s scientific professional background informs his keenness to create what he calls Influential Environments. He wants to tease the brain while testing its limitations, through activity and passivity, agency and inertia. He conceived his first game with a group of friends in 1992, during a tedious dinner after an exhibition opening. Since then, he has collected and invented ideas, inspired by friends, life, the Surrealists, and Arthur Rimbaud. All games are illustrated with commissioned or pre-existing artworks and photographs. We find portraits by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, August Sander, and Nan Goldin next to paintings by Salvador Dalí; snapshots of Joseph Beuys plus son and Donna Haraway plus dog next to appointed pieces by Christine Sun Kim and Anri Sala; film stills by Chantal Akerman, extracts from Shakespeare as well as treasures from Höller’s personal archive—and his mother’s.

Edited by Stefanie Hessler and Hans Ulrich Obrist, this book encourages readers to engage in playful yet cerebral experiments that will leave them with a sense of wonder, disorientation, and a subtle smirk on their face.

As an artist, Carsten Höller conducts radical experiments. His “Influential Environments” explore alternative scenarios, reimagining possibilities for human behavior and interaction and have been shown in major installations and solo exhibitions internationally over the last two decades. In 2022, he opened his restaurant Brutalisten in Stockholm and presented the third iteration of The Double Club in Los Angeles in 2024. Born in 1961 in Brussels to German parents, Höller currently lives and works in Stockholm and Biriwa, Ghana.

Follow @Carsten.Holler on Instagram.