Christoph Büchel

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (June 2011) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 9,119 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Christoph Büchel]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Christoph Büchel}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Christoph Büchel (born 1966) is a Swiss artist known for provocative contemporary installations.

Since early 2007, Büchel has been ensconced in a legal dispute with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (commonly known as "Mass MoCA"). The museum had agreed to take on Büchel's massive project, "Training Ground for Democracy," only to balk at certain costs associated with some of the planned installations. The museum, which had already invested significantly in the exhibit, won permission in court to open it to the public without the consent of Büchel, who claims to do so would misrepresent his work. Mass MoCA's Director, Joe Thompson, decided to dismantle it instead without opening it to the public.^[4]

Selected works

For the 2015 Venice Biennale, Christoph Büchel contributed Iceland's national pavilion which consisted of a conceptual work of art which transformed the 10th-century old Church of the Abbey of Misericordia into a generic mosque.^[5] Labeled The Mosque: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice, it was partly inspired by disputes in Iceland over building the first purpose-built Reykjavík Mosque.^[3][6] After a complaint presented by a member of the neo-fascist party New Force, the Venetian authorities closed the installation, citing permit violations.^[7][3]

Büchel encouraged artistic recognition of eight prototypes of the border wall erected near the US-Mexico border. Büchel mobilized support through an online petition. ^[2]

For the