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10/10/2006

Christoph Buchel

Hauser & Wirth, London

Simply Botiful

Christoph Buchel’s major installation at Hauser & Wirth Coppermill transforms the East End gallery into a sprawling recycling camp. A seedy hotel reception and makeshift shop front lead into a space that appears to have been hurriedly abandoned. Benches are piled high with electronic innards: refrigerator parts, dismantled televisions, endless cables and computer components. Cluttered temporary workstations indicate an illicit workforce, housed until recently in the squalid conditions of the empty cargo containers that make up this grim urban village. The oppressive and confined rooms tell of the unsavoury living conditions and lurid exploitation that are mediated through endlessly repeated newsreels. This once bustling centre of a black market economy embodies the uneasy relationship between housing and internment, placing the visitor in the brutally contradictory role of intruder and voyeur.

Venturing further into the space, we are confronted by an apparently unauthorised archaeological dig. The vast shape of a mammoth rises from a huge gaping hole in the gallery floor, its tusks emerging from a freshly excavated earth block. This complex installation refuses easy interpretation. It offers instead a cacophony of contradictory histories that endlessly replay acts of dismantling, uncovering, reuse and reinterpretation. Buchel forces viewers of his work to participate in scenarios that are both physically demanding and psychologically unsettling. Cramped corridors, claustrophobic chambers and frequent dead-ends induce feelings of panic and paranoia. His work is informed by an explicit political awareness of events in the aftermath of 9/11, reflecting a global social and political disruption. Experiencing such charged spaces is usually a solitary task, though this private experience becomes the means by which collective tensions and traumas might be unearthed.

Christoph Buchel (born Basel 1966) studied at the University of Art and Design, Basel, from 1986-89, at Cooper Union School of Art, New York in 1989-90, and at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 1992-1997. In 2000-2001, he was awarded a scholarship at PS1, New York. Recent solo exhibitions included: 'Shelter' at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2002); ‘Private Territories’ at the Swiss Institute, New York (2004); 'Close Quarters' at Kunstverein Freiburg (2004); and 'Hole' at Kunsthalle Basel (2005). In 2005, he collaborated with Gianni Motti at the Venice Biennale. Christoph Buchel lives and works in Basel.

Hauser & Wirth
196A Piccadilly - London
GALLERY HOURS Thursday to Sunday 12 - 7pm

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