Four Giant Silver Slides by Carsten Höller Now Spiral Through a Mexico City Shopping Mall
Four giant spiral slides by the artist Carsten Höller are now a permanent installation in Mexico City, and anyone can ride them. ArtNews reported the work, called Mexico City Slides (2026), at Arte Abierto Polanco.
The slides are built into Antara, an upscale open-air shopping mall in the city. They range from 39 to 125 feet (about 12 to 38 metres) in height and from 102 to 295 feet (about 31 to 90 metres) in length. Each slide can carry four riders at once, so a group can race down side by side.
Riders can get on at several points. The entrances sit beside family-style restaurants, the Google offices, the Rosewood Hotel and the Arte Abierto Art Space. All four slides end at the same exit, so the paths twist and cross on the way down but finish in one place.
The commission came from Arte Abierto and Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos, the Mexico City architecture firm. Arte Abierto is the arts programme that organised the project. Sordo Madaleno worked on the building side, shaping how the slides fit into the mall.
Höller has been making slides for a long time. He started his slide series in 1998, and the work has since appeared in several cities. In Stockholm, his Stockholm Slides spiral down the outside of the Moderna Museet, the national modern art museum. That work opened to the public on 4 October 2025 and was later added to the museum's permanent collection, which means the museum now holds it as part of its long-term holdings.
Höller was born in 1961 in Brussels to German parents. He lives in Stockholm and in Biriwa, a fishing town on the coast of Ghana.
For visitors, the appeal is simple. The slides are free to use as part of the open-air setting, and they put a piece of contemporary art in a place where people are already shopping and eating. The mall, the restaurants and the offices around the entrances all share the same public space as the artwork.
Because the slides are permanent, they will stay in place beyond a single season. Anyone planning a visit can see them without waiting for a limited run to open or close.
