By J.J. Charlesworth

Carsten Höller has long toyed with the nature of human perception, behaviour and the experience of the art institution. From making his name during the 2000s with the Slide works, which allowed visitors a different take on (and way of moving between levels of) museum buildings, to training people to see upside down, to getting museum visitors to sleep in robot beds that roamed the galleries overnight, the former agricultural scientist creates dynamic works that turn galleries and museums into experimental sites. Now, collaborating with MIT dream-science researcher Adam Haar, Höller is premiering the first in seven ‘dream rooms’ of his Dream Hotel project, the outcome of the artist’s 2021 MIT residency, at the Fondation Beyeler. Each room is conceived to produce a certain kind of dream, from lucid dreaming to nightmares. ArtReview spoke with Höller and Haar ahead of the show, to find out what reshaping peoples’ dreams might lead to.

ArtReview: Your new work, Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics, which you’re presenting in the Fondation Beyeler’s summer show, is the first iteration – the first ‘room’ – of the wider Dream Hotel project. Back in 2006, in an interview with ArtReview, you said that ‘the real material I’m working with is people’s experience’. How does working with ‘people’s experiences as material’ come into play in this new project?

Carsten Höller: People’s experiences, in this case, are people’s dreams. You can book Room 1 during the daytime for 45 minutes to an hour. You can take a nap, or you can also book it for the whole night. Adam is sleeping there for the first time tonight. I will sleep there for the first time tomorrow, and then we have two more guests coming. Then from then on, it will be a regular schedule, but we want to test it first because it’s a new thing.

What happens is, you lay down on this round bed, and you hear a voice telling you that this is specifically created to elicit or reinforce dreams of flying. To dream of flying with fly agaric mushrooms, because while you lay in the bed you look up and you see a replica of a mushroom that literally flies around your head and is lit in a very specific way that makes the shape of the mushroom appear to change, to morph into different forms.