Carsten Höller

Carsten Höller’s photogravure Reindeer Head (2010) shows a reindeer in a clinically white setting. In his artistic practice, Höller – who began to work as an artist after his doctorate and first work experiences in the agricultural sciences – explores the relationship between art and science. His main interest is in human perception, but also in biological species such as plants, birds, mushrooms, or reindeers.

In 2010, Höller’s light installation Rentier Rot-Grün (Reindeer Red-Green) at the Schering Stiftung was on view at the same time as his exhibition SOMA at the museum Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Real reindeers populated the museum’s central hall. Höller created an experimental setup that significantly influenced the work’s presentation: one half of the reindeers were fed hallucinogenic fly agaric while the animals that lived separately from them on the other side of the hall did not eat these mushrooms. The artist claimed to be able to produce from the urine of the animals who had consumed fly agaric a consciousness-expanding potion called soma that is regarded as sacred in Hinduism.

During the exhibition, he then administered this elixir to the mice and canaries that populated the installation alongside the reindeers. In doing so, the artist had developed an artistic experiment designed to probe the effects of soma.

The photogravure image of the reindeer was created as part of the show at the Hamburger Bahnhof. It survives the exhibition as a symbol of a scientific experiment that ultimately did not deliver any results. Instead of providing answers, Höller raised further fundamental questions about how humans gain knowledge. These include not only the value and validity of gaining knowledge through observation and perception but also the question of interpretive authority in an experimental setup where issues of faith, mysticism, and biology overlapped and merged.