An International Consortium of Museums Has Invited 16 Locked-Down Artists to Create Work for Their Balconies

As more of the world enters into
isolation to protect public health, windows, balconies and building
façades have taken on a new role in public life.

Seven international museums
including Madrid’s Reina Sofia and the M HKA in Antwerp have tapped
into the potential of these externally-facing spaces for artistic
expression, commissioning 16 locked-down artists to create artworks
for their balconies. The initiative is the first major
non-commercial endeavor to arise since countries globally began
sheltering-in-place last month.

Called “Artists in Quarantine,”
each new project will respond to the present moment.
The catalyzing idea was Sanja
Iveković’s historic 1979 work called Triangle, in which the Croatian artist carried out an
18-minute public performance on her balcony to protest the
communist president Tito’s visit to Zagreb, which was then in
Yugoslavia. In the
provocative work, Iveković read, drank whisky, and gestured as
though she was masturbating until a security official came and
ordered her back inside.

The artists who are now in
quarantine are invited to respond to the question: “Do such
domestic spaces still have the potential to be subversive and make
a public statement, as Iveković’s balcony did in the late
1970s?” Their artistic proposals will be published online
twice a week for the next two months on Tuesdays and
Thursdays.

The Slovenian artist Maja
Smrekar is the first artist whose work is being shared today, April
21. The museums are sharing a piece that Smrekar began on March 19
in collaboration with Urška Lipovž. For
weeks, Smrekar has been
blasting a 90-second recording of the leftwing anthem “The
Internationale,” which the artist says she has co-opted as a hymn
for “mobility in times of immobility.” The song plays on a speaker
out of her window that faces a government building across the
street. The action references a scene from Federico
Fellini’s 1973 film
Amarcord, in which a gramophone plays the same anthem
from a town’s church bell tower. Set in Italy in the 1930s, the
gramophone is quickly shot down by fascists. 

The artist says that she began
the performance in mid-March when the Slovenian government raised
top government officials’ salaries by 30 percent while “any
solutions of solidarity for all the rest of the civil society have
not been solved at all.” The artist plans to continue the action
daily until the end of the country’s lockdown.

Included in the line-up is
Azerbaijani visual artist and poet Babi Badalo, Johannesburg-based
artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu, and New Zealand artist Kate Newby. The
full line up includes artists Osman Bozkurt, Ola
Hassanain, Siniša Labrović, Rogelio López Cuenca & Elo Vega,
Daniela Ortiz, Zeyno Pekünlü, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Guy Woueté,
Akram Zaatari, and Paweł Żukowski.

The participating museums are
all part of an international museum confederation called
L’Internationale, which includes the Reina
Sofia and
M
HKA, as well as
the Moderna
Galerija in
Ljubljana, Slovenia;
MACBA in Barcelona, Spain; MSN
in Warsaw, Poland; SALT
in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey;
and Van
Abbemuseum in Eindhoven,
the Netherlands.

The post An International Consortium of Museums Has Invited
16 Locked-Down Artists to Create Work for Their Balconies
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