Christoph Büchel

For his first major U.S. museum exhibition, Christoph Büchel will transform MASS MoCA’s football field-size gallery into an imagined temporary community housed in sea containers and trailers and including a playing field, a cinema, and more. This vast architectural installation will be a maze of democratic civic life drawn from politically charged internet, magazine and newspaper images. Training Ground for Democracy will take an unblinking look at the political landscape of our time.

This Swiss artist’s labor intensive installations work from familiar architectural environments to create vernacular space where underlying psychological tensions (both personal and political) emerge. The richly detailed tableaux often remove the museum context and transport the viewer to a hybrid space of paranoia/pleasure, fantasy/reality.

In 2002, Büchel transformed the two-story New York gallery Maccarone Inc. into a series of cut up rooms by hacking through the floor, bisecting existing spaces, and installing an exterior roof to his installation on the top floor of the gallery. In his 2004 exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York City, he divided an apartment with a concrete wall making it seem like the dwelling of two roommates who do not get along. Ken Johnson of the New York Times wrote of this exhibit, “the main excitement of Mr. Büchel's ingenious construction is the Alice-in-Wonderland feeling of entering a mysteriously eccentric and possibly nonsensical parallel universe."

Supported in part by Peter and Jill Kraus and Pro Helvetia.

Pressetext

Christoph Büchel
Training Ground for Democracy