At Art Basel Miami Beach 2007, the gallery Hauser & Wirth presented Christoph Büchel’s installation “Training Ground for Training Ground for Democracy, 2007”. The installation is a scaled-down version of the aborted work for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art MASS MoCA. It consists basically of a shipping container and includes original Florida voting booths, Arabic propaganda films, a bomb, a ladder to climb the container’s roof, bad food, and lots of other stuff. According to The Art Newspaper it sold for $250,000 to the Flick Collection. Friedrich Christian Flick then donated it to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin (Germany), where the artwork was on view in the main hall in 2016, to mark 20 years of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin.
Christoph Büchel was born in Basel in 1966. He is best known for his large-scale installations and conceptual projects, such “Hole” at Kunsthalle Basel in 2005, “Simply Botiful” at Hauser & Wirth London in 2006, “The Mosque” at the Venice Art Biennale (Icelandic Pavilion) in 2015, and “Barca Nostra” at the Venice Art Biennale in 2019.
Christoph Büchel: Training Ground for Training Ground for Democracy (2007). Hauser & Wirth at Art Basel Miami Beach, December 5, 2007.
VTV Classics (r3): Christoph Büchel: Training Ground for Training Ground for Democracy (2007) is the 69th episode in our VTV Classics (r3) series. VTV Classics (r3) highlights the treasures of VernissageTV’s huge archive. Back then published in Standard Definition, these classics are now re-mastered, re-edited and reissued in High Definition.
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Complete video (11:05 min.):
