[The show did not open as scheduled on Thursday. Read more here.]

Exhibition efforts have been plagued by problems. The debut was initially planned for Berlin in September — intended as the first stop of a three-city tour that would then travel to Paris and London. It was canceled weeks before it was supposed to open, when city administrators rejected a proposal to build a concrete wall around the interactive spectacle. The wall was intended to be 1.5 miles long and painted by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, encircling the event until its final night, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when it would be torn down.

Once announced, the wall began to divide people (as walls do), stirring up debates about painful historical events that are never far from the surface in Germany. “I don’t believe in reconstructing a totalitarian system as an experiment,” said Sabine Bangert, a politician from the Greens party, who, like many Berliners, felt that the construction of a concrete barrier just meters from where the Berlin Wall once stood was an insult to those whose lives had been torn apart by it.