watch carsten höller turn art-world encounters into surreal games for a giant polaroid

games as a way of seeing

‘I would prefer not to be in this film,‘ Carsten Höller says. Too late. Over the course of a year and a half, the artist is followed from Venice to London, Arles and the Fondation Beyeler near Basel, joined along the way by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jürgen Teller, Maja Hoffmann, India Mahdavi, Bas Smets and an unusually cumbersome traveling companion: the Polaroid 20×24, the world’s largest instant camera.

The resulting 20-minute documentary, released by the Polaroid Foundation as The Carsten Höller Episode of The 20×24 Project. The film offers a loose and funny glimpse into the artist’s world through the games collected in his Book of Games. People pull hair, walk, pose and submit themselves to small experiments whose rules are often simple enough to sound almost inconsequential. What Höller is interested in is what happens once somebody agrees to play.

the world’s largest instant camera joins the trip

The camera travels with him through a circuit familiar to those in the art world. Games take place at Palazzo Diedo in Venice, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, Rencontres d’Arles and Fondation Beyeler in Riehen. Obrist, Teller, Hoffmann, artist and musician Casey Spooner, Mahdavi and Smets drift in and out. Rather than conventional interviews, the games become a way of approaching them. People have something to do, a rule to follow or another person to respond to, and the camera watches what changes.

At the center of all this is the enormous Polaroid 20×24. Its photographs measure roughly 20 by 24 inches, turning the familiar immediacy of an instant photograph into something closer to an event. The project leaves behind a growing collection of portraits alongside the moving image footage, and fixes individual moments from Höller’s experiments at a scale that feels almost absurd for something normally associated with a photograph developing in your hand.

inside höller’s world of birds, food and experiments

The journey eventually becomes more personal. In Stockholm, Carsten Höller brings the crew home, where around seventy birds live in his aviary, before heading to the roof of Moderna Museet and to Brutalisten, the concept restaurant he founded around food prepared from a single principal ingredient. Elsewhere, the group heads into the Camargue, France, on what the film describes as a ‘sad bird’-watching expedition.

Games have occupied Höller for decades, often as a way of disturbing familiar patterns of behavior and perception. Book of Games, published in 2024, gathers those experiments into instructions that anyone can follow. Some are social, some psychological and some intentionally ridiculous. Höller speaks in the film about removing the middle ground between opposing states, especially joy and fear, to leave players somewhere closer to either end.

what happens when people agree to play

There isn’t much separation between portrait, interview, experiment and joke. A photograph becomes evidence that something happened, while the game creates the conditions for it to happen in the first place. And despite Höller’s stated reluctance to appear, the accumulating footage gradually becomes a portrait of him too: his friends, his birds, his recurring questions and the elaborate situations he keeps inventing to see what people might do next.

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project info:

project: The Carsten Höller Episode of The 20×24 Project
artist: Carsten Höller | @carsten.holler
presented by: The Polaroid Foundation | @polaroid_foundation
date: October 2nd, 2026
photography: © Oliver Helbig | @o.helbig_fotograf