For the exhibition Half Fiction at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Carsten Holler developed his investigation of doubts, uncertainty, and perplexity in what was first solo exhibition in a U.S. museum. Holler has been shaking the foundations of his viewer’s assumptions during this time with installations or interactive sculptures that deliberately but often playfully induced doubts and confusion. At the ICA, Holler decided to explore the notion of a half-state, neither entirely one thing nor another, in a series of experiences that hovered enigmatically in a state of constant “in-betweenness.”
Comparable perhaps to the way a scientist works, Holler employed the audience as his subjects, so to speak, of perceptual and psychological experimentation. However, as no data was collected, and no objective results were aimed for, his works quite unscientifically emphasize the notion of individual and collective experience; he produced the instruments allowing the visitors to experiment with themselves. Rather than presenting what is “known” to an audience, or what he “knows”, Holler was interested in the exploration of the more elusive and more personal “unknown.” “I don’t want to show that something is there,” Holler had said, “or to pretend to know what it is: my wish is to get there. My work is to explore the possibilities of how to get there.”