Thanks to his twisting slides in Tate Modern, Carsten Höller is one of today's most high-profile young artists. So, how has he decided to follow up that magnificent art piece - or stunt - depending on whether you're in the “it's not art” or the “who cares” camp? With a temporary nightclub. Themed around the Congo. Well, it's no less eyebrow-raising.

The club opens this week but we met first at the hard-hat site in Islington, North London, in September. Then Höller's idea was to juxtapose Western and Congolese music, culture and even food. The artist fell in love with the Congo in 2001. He'd been on a dancefloor in Benin, dancing to Congolese music, and instantly knew he had to visit the country. He now goes there at least once year. Talking to him then, the nightclub idea seemed bold, if whimsical, sponsored as it is by the Prada Foundation, the art foundation set up by the fashion designer Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli.

However now, what was conceived initially as a socially-engaged art work designed to showcase Congolese culture, runs the risk of seeming unengaged, even blasé, given the disturbing news from eastern Congo. Höller has thought a lot about this but disagrees, seeing the piece as more relevant, more vital than ever. He hopes that it will make people look beyond the headlines about the place - the setting for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - which make it seem doomed, a place where “only bad things happen”.

He is developing an educational and cultural programme to operate during the six-month lifespan of the club and all profits will go to City of Joy, a charity for rape victims in the Congo. So this won't be a case of the European art scene clubbing while Goma burns.

Höller contrasts our approach to the Congo with our attitude towards India. “We happily go on a trip to Kerala or Mumbai,” he says, despite sectarian violence, Maoist guerrillas or the fighting in Kashmir. He also points out that Kinshasa “is 3,000km [1,900 miles] from Goma, where the fighting is taking place”, which is about the distance from Lisbon to Prague.

As for the “is it art?” question, Höller seems relaxed, not least because his intention is to escape the confines of the art world and “export my so-called artistic ideas out of the museum and gallery into a more lively context”. The club might sound like a strange idea, but Höller is in the habit of making implausible ideas successful. After all, three million visitors whizzed down his Test Site slides.

“It's wonderful,” says Miuccia Prada of the Tate slides, “because at that moment your life is suspended.” Prada has one installed in her office, “At the beginning, I used it all the time,” she laughs, before admitting that she hasn't for a while. “I'll do it now,” she jokes, “after this call.”

Höller is “very interested in the idea of fun. So understandable, but so strange, so parasitic, and at the same time so important, so much of a guide in terms of taking decisions”. The Double Club he argues, is “related to the slides in a certain way, because it is also dealing with some kind of fun or entertainment and trying to dissect it almost - to take the different elements apart so that you can have a closer look.”

Höller, 47, trained as a scientist. His works are experiments that he takes very seriously indeed. Prada is highly amused that the Double Club involves “Carsten having to worry about getting the food right. It's funny, no? An artist having to worry about cooking?” But Congolese music seems set to be the big discovery for many in London. Höller describes the moment that he first heard it as “a revelation. I thought: ‘What is this?'”

The club's dancefloor, along with the DJ booth, will revolve between two areas of the space, according to whether the DJ is playing Western or Congolese music. In the bar, Congolese art will dominate one side of the room, while Russian utopian art, hand-painted on to Portuguese tiles, covers the other, “like slices of different realities, if you like, put together and avoiding any moment of fusion,” Höller explains. “Back to back and not really coming together, it produces a certain kind of beauty and I believe in having unresolved situations between these two slightly incompatible elements. It's a very interesting way to define a space; not one or the other, but the two at the same time.”

Höller is keen for people to have a good time there, but seems a bit put out when I suggest some people might be too busy having a good time to pick up on what he's trying to do. But then the idea of being drunk begins to interest him.

“If you go to a club to get drunk, to have a blast, you go to be another person,” he says. “It is very frustrating to be confined in one personality. It would be great to have the two at the same time, half of you drunk and half of you sober. But I think that's the best part of it, if you can calculate that duality.”

The Double Club opens on Thursday. www.thedoubleclub.co.uk

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