Carsten Höller has spent almost three decades persuading museums to let visitors slide. His newest piece leaves the museum behind. Mexico City Slides (2026) is a permanent installation of four stainless-steel spiral slides at Arte Abierto Polanco, the new venue of the Mexican art organisation Arte Abierto inside the Antara complex in Mexico City. According to Arte Abierto, it is the largest slide work Höller has realised to date.
The numbers
The four tubes differ sharply in scale: they range from 12 to 38 metres in height and from 31 to 90 metres in length. Each one starts from a different part of the development — a row of restaurants, the offices of Google, the future Rosewood Mexico City hotel and Arte Abierto’s own art space — and all four end at the same landing area. One rider fits in each tube, so four people can set off at the same moment from four different worlds and arrive side by side.
An “equalizer”
That shared arrival is the point. Höller calls the work an “equalizer”: whatever brought you to Antara, you end up next to strangers at the bottom, probably laughing. He has also described the sensation of sliding as a “voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind”. You do not have to ride; the slides can be watched from the gardens and plazas, or simply read as sculpture woven into the facades.
Part of a long series
The commission, realised by Arte Abierto and developer SOMA with the architecture practice Sordo Madaleno, belongs to a series Höller began in 1998. Earlier chapters include Test Site at Tate Modern (2006), the Vitra Slide Tower in Weil am Rhein (2014), the Florence Experiment at Palazzo Strozzi (2018) and the DAC Slide in Copenhagen (2020).
The slides are part of Antara’s latest expansion in Colonia Granada and are scheduled to open to the public, free of charge, in December 2026. Arte Abierto says it will announce the exact activation date on its channels.