2019

In 2019, a memorable exhibition wowed audiences as a part of the Festival of the Winds. Michaela Gleave’s 7 Stunden Ballonarbiet/7 Hour Balloon Work filled the Bondi Pavilion Gallery with nearly 10,000 biodegradable balloons over a three week period.

At the centre of the exhibition was a video artwork featuring a live video performance that was streamed from Berlin to the Oxford Art Factory in Sydney in 2010. In this piece, the artist spent seven hours in her studio in Berlin continuously blowing up balloons, gradually filling the space until she buried herself under her labours. At the completion of the performance, the artist popped all the balloons and left the room.

For the Bondi Pavilion, Gleave revisited 7 Stunden Ballonarbiet/7 Hour Balloon Work as an installation environment, projecting video documentation of the performance into the gallery space amid a sea of coloured balloons. Unlike the original iteration of the piece, audiences were able to play in the balloons, with the archival footage re-edited, seven hours rendered down into 17 minutes in an almost comical condensation of time. It was a hugely popular exhibition with many visitors attending multiple times, and gallery staff commenting for months afterwards that visitors were dismayed that the balloon artwork was no longer present.

Courtesy Michaela Gleave and Silversalt Photography.