FLY ON AMANITA: CARSTEN HÖLLER

FLY ON AMANITA presents a video installation by Carsten Höller, curated by Udo Kittelmann. The work features a green bottle fly performing within a pristine white environment. The insect cleans itself, approaches a pale orange jello drop, feeds, enters an altered state, recovers, and flies away. The sequence loops endlessly, somewhere between scientific observation and 90s music video, laboratory experiment and choreography.

Trained as an agricultural entomologist, Höller has long worked at the unstable boundary between scientific experiment and artistic experience. Flies recur throughout his practice as organisms whose behaviour raises questions of perception, instinct, and consciousness. Mushrooms, particularly Amanita muscaria - for which Höller is perhaps best known, function as agents of transformation, dissolving the certainty of ordinary experience.

Known as the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria has long occupied a space between folklore, ritual, and toxicology. Traditionally, pieces of the mushroom were soaked in milk to attract and intoxicate flies, the origin of its common name. Drawn to the sweetness, the insects consume the liquid, become disoriented, lose control of their movements and, if the dose permits, eventually recover. Höller’s video isolates this simple biological encounter, letting it unfold with clinical precision while quietly inviting comparison with human behaviour.

Presented in Hermannplatz, where addiction is part of the everyday urban landscape, the work acquires an unexpected resonance. The fly cleans itself, consumes, surrenders, recovers, and begins again. The loop offers neither judgement nor redemption; it simply repeats, exposing addiction less as spectacle than as rhythm, a cycle of desire, release, and return.

There is another layer. The fly appears to seek not merely intoxication but the altered condition itself. The possibility of pursuing an experience for its own sake, of desiring a second-order state of consciousness, has often been considered a uniquely human capacity, shared perhaps only with dolphins. Whether the fly truly experiences such a high remains unknowable, and Höller leaves that uncertainty unresolved, allowing projection to become part of the work.

FLY ON AMANITA (2025), oscillates between experiment and fiction, humour and discomfort, biology and psychology. What begins as the observation of an insect becomes a reflection on compulsion, pleasure, and the fragile mechanisms that govern behaviour, revealing how little may separate instinct from choice.