With Museums Locked Down Across Europe, Bored Artists in Berlin Turned Their Balconies Into Mini Art Galleries to Combat Isolation

While much of the art world uploads its content online, a
curatorial initiative in locked-down Berlin has asked artists and
cultural producers to put up art on their balconies instead,
prompting viewers to put down their phones and go outside for a
walk.

Some 50 Berlin creatives showed their works on balconies and
windows on Sunday and Monday as creative messages of solidarity
during the coronavirus lockdown. The spontaneous DIY project,
called “Life, art, pandemic and proximity” was organized by
curators Övül Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza. The contributor
list included artists as well as curators and art writers, and
works ranged from performances to installations.

Among them were artist Raul Walch’s blue floating sculptures,
twisting slowly in the wind off of a pre-war balcony. “Lockdown
doesn’t mean to lock in our thoughts,” Walch tells Artnet News.
“Art and artists will always find new ways of going public.”

The 48-hour showcase worked around the problem of the crowds
that are drawn to gallery openings, which are currently banned in
Germany. The balconies were “on view” across the cobbled
streets of the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood in the north-east of
the German capital. Viewers were invited to download and follow a
map with no set start or end point (to limit crowds), and A4
printouts marked with the letter “B” served as physical guides to
tell people where to stop and look up, like an artistic Easter egg
hunt.

Public art has gained new currency as galleries and museums in
Germany and most of the world remain closed. Balconies have also
become a place for connectivity in the real world, and many have
been inspired by the Italian musicians who took to their balconies
for an impromptu concert as the virus’s devastating effects were
peaking and overwhelming their country’s healthcare system.
Elsewhere, locked down citizens have been popping their heads out
of their windows or stepping onto their terraces to applaud health
workers.

Seven European museums, including the Reina Sofía museum in
Madrid, are also in the midst of commissioning artists to create
balcony-based art, with dates and participants still to be
announced.

Others taking part in the Berlin initiative include the artist
Olaf Nicolai, who participated in the 2017 documenta in Kassel as
well as the Venice Biennale. Nicolai contributed a small
window-based work, sticking three oranges to his window in
reference to John Baldessari and his piece Throwing Three Balls
in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six
Attempts). Elsewhere, the writer Tom McCarthy and artist Eva
Stenram displayed plastic crows (the two say the store-bought
birds play a “similar role to antibodies: in simulating the form of
a bird, they keep real birds at bay.) Not far from there,
curator Sonja Lau hung a banner that said “Whether we’ll see
each other again.”

“Balconies serve as the public apertures of the private. They
seem to be where the house ends, and yet not,” the
curators Durmusoglu and Warsza wrote in a statement that was
attached to the downloadable map. “In their political history,
[balconies] have both been terraces of openness and hope, as well
as platforms for authoritarianism and supremacy,” the organizers
added.

German chancellor Angela Merkel is set to have a press
conference on Wednesday where the government will either extend the
lockdown or lift restrictions. Schools and non-essential businesses
have been closed and gatherings of over two people banned since
mid-March.

“In times of quarantine, so many of us cultural workers living
in Berlin happen to all be here; not far from each other, and yet
absent as usual,” continued Durmusoglu and Warsza. “We are asked to
commit to the digital space, without critically estimating the
effects of for-profit information technologies.”

The post With Museums Locked Down Across Europe, Bored
Artists in Berlin Turned Their Balconies Into Mini Art Galleries to
Combat Isolation appeared first on artnet News.