T magazine: A Hot Pink Carousel Touches Down in Switzerland

The Belgian artist Carsten Höller has long made art that challenges his audience’s expectations of what they might find in a museum, from a spiraling slide that he installed around Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London in 2006 to the hallucination-inducing light frequencies he displayed at New York’s New Museum in 2011. “I’d like the art world to be a bit more playful,” he says. In 2005, he debuted his reworking of a life-size fairground carousel in a show at Gagosian’s London gallery. He’s revisited the form since, with installations in Copenhagen and Melbourne. The latest iteration, “Pink Mirror Carousel,” opens today on the ice rink of the Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, where it will reside for the next two years. Measuring 23 feet high and nearly 16 feet wide, the carousel is ringed with lights, 24 suspended seats and highly reflective pink surfaces. Part fun-house mirror, part merry-go-round, it moves slowly, offering riders an unusually meditative experience. As Höller says, “It puts you in a dreamy mood and you have to let go in your mind.” “Pink Mirror Carousel” is accessible daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., weather permitting. Access is free for guests of the Kulm Hotel and is open to all with an admission fee of $15 for adults and $7.50 for children, kulm.com.