A hot pink carousel appears in the snow-covered landscape of St. Moritz as part of an installation by German-Belgian artist Carsten Höller. Set within the grounds of the Kulm Hotel St. Moritz, the work introduces a vivid chromatic contrast to the surrounding Alpine environment, its mirrored surfaces reflecting both the white scenery and the movement of visitors.
Titled Pink Mirror Carousel (2025), the installation is positioned on the hotel’s ice rink, opposite the Kulm Country Club. At first glance, it resembles a traditional amusement ride associated with childhood and leisure. However, Höller reconfigures this familiar form into a sculptural device that alters expectations of motion, duration, and participation.
Unlike a conventional carousel, which rotates rapidly, this structure is engineered to complete a full rotation every two minutes. The upper section turns counterclockwise, while the middle section rotates in the opposite direction. This slow and opposing movement transforms the ride into a precise time-based mechanism, encouraging stillness and awareness rather than excitement. Visitors who step onto the carousel become active components of the work, both observing and being observed through the reflective pink panels.
The carousel functions as a recurring motif within Höller’s broader artistic practice, where such structures serve as tools for perceptual disruption. By modifying speed and direction, the artist challenges habitual experiences of time and motion, creating situations that blur the boundaries between artwork, viewer, and performer.
Höller describes the work as a sculpture animated by human presence, where mechanical rotation intersects with biological time. The installation privileges contemplation over entertainment, offering an experience that may unsettle expectations while inviting reflection on perception, embodiment, and being.
Pink Mirror Carousel aligns with Höller’s ongoing exploration of participatory environments and perceptual experiments, extending his investigation into how simple mechanisms can generate complex psychological and temporal experiences.
Carsten Höller installs Pink Mirror Carousel on the ice rink of the Kulm Hotel St. Moritz this winter, introducing a slowed, reflective amusement structure to the Alpine resort. Clad in pink mirrored panels and precisely calibrated to complete a full rotation every two minutes, the work takes a familiar fairground structure and transforms it into an immersive sculptural environment that folds time, movement, and spectatorship into a disorienting experience set against the Engadin landscape.
Installed outdoors on the hotel’s ice rink, Pink Mirror Carousel continues Höller’s long-standing engagement with amusement rides as what he calls ‘confusion machines.’ Rather than delivering speed or thrill, the carousel deliberately slows the body down. Its rotation becomes almost meditative, encouraging riders to register duration, repetition, and anticipation as material conditions. The structure is composed of twelve identical mirrored segments arranged as a dodecagon, reflecting skaters, riders, the surrounding mountains, and the carousel itself in shifting fragments.
While earlier carousel works by Höller have required up to twenty-four hours for a single turn, the St. Moritz installation completes its cycle in exactly two minutes. This double minute references the carousel’s counter-rotating elements, with the top turning counter-clockwise and the middle section rotating clockwise. The result is a subtle but persistent sense of misalignment, where mechanical precision and bodily perception never fully sync. As Baldo Hauser, the Belgian artist’s alter ego, notes, the work functions as ‘a sculpture with people inside, animating the inanimate, the mechanical, the lifeless rotation with the realness of human bodies being transported through their own biological time.’
Music curated by the Kulm Hotel’s directeur d’ambiance, Arman Naféei, accompanies the skating rink, layering sound into the experience. Open to both hotel guests and the public, the installation operates as a shared, temporary situation.
