Carsten Höller—Fly on Amanita

›Fly on Amanita‹ presents a video installation by Carsten Höller, curated by Udo Kittelmann, at Passage in Hermannplatz, Berlin.

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, 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 used to attract and intoxicate flies, the mushroom gives the work both its title and its premise. Höller's video isolates this simple biological encounter and allows it to unfold with clinical precision while inviting comparison with human behaviour.

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.