christopher robbins bio | contact | links

Ghana ThinkTank at ZKM, Germany (2011)

 

The Ghana ThinkTank is Developing the First World.
Problems collected in Germany were sent to Think Tanks formed in Ghana, Mexico, Serbia, Cambodia and the Gaza Strip for resolution. We then travelled to Germany to implement the think tanks' solutions.

This took place as part of the show The Global Contemporary | Art Worlds After 1989 at ZKM, and involved hiring Africans (from a charismatic church) to attend German social functions, pitting neighboring but dislocated communities against each other in street chess, organizing a real-life tele-novella that included a cheating husband, a bitch slap, and a jello fight, and arranging Parkour lessons to show the citizens of Karlsruhe that no city lacks topography.

The installation:
Built in a former equestrian training center in the suburbs of Karlsruhe, piled onto a trailer built to transport small airplanes, towed by a bright orange vintage Ford Transit to the much swanker, starker, technological climes of ZKM Contemporary Art Center, the installation portion of our show involved a landscape-like series of bevels crafted from synthetic aged wood, populated with a vintage cassette player full of funny, dirty stories told by elderly Germans, manekin-tops in t-shirts, and a machine for collecting problems that asks us all WAS IST DEIN PROBLEM?

More photos here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks so much to Andy and Stefan our wonderful carpenters for their ever-flexible help on this crazy project (as I told Andy, I want these things to look like something people would see and think 'I could make that, if I were crazy enough...' , to Kevin Patton for setting up the blinking button/ video booth, and Anne, Anne and Antonia for making this possible! We know we are a moving target, so thanks for your patience and perserverance.

© christopher robbins 1998-now