Karina Smigla-Bobinski’s ADA, an inflatable work spiked with charcoals that will leave marks on the floors and walls.
Photo: Balloon Museum
For anyone hoping for a South Street Seaport revival, the past few months have been a downer. Longtime mainstays, like the local outposts of Fellow Barber and Malibu Farm, have decamped; the Di Fara Pizza outpost closed last year. But the worst blow by far was the closure, back in February, of the Tin Building, chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s food hall di tutti food halls, which, despite a couple good bars and a sensational in-house brand of smoked salt, never quite seemed to take off. But for the neighborhood, and for the now-vacant building itself, there is hope. And it floats.
After an apparently very-well-attended tour of cities like Paris, Berlin, and Los Angeles, along with a New York City pop-up on Pier 36, the Balloon Museum — a large-scale immersive experience featuring, you know, balloons — will be setting up shop in the former Jean-Georges facility. “It’s an extraordinary milestone for us,” says Roberto Fantauzzi, the CEO and founder of the museum’s sponsor group, Italy-based Lux Entertainment. Opening on July 15, the new attraction will be the organization’s first permanent location. Previous outings have featured elaborate displays that mingle conventional latex blowups with digital projections, soap bubbles, and (if the YouTube trailer is any suggestion) thrumming Euro-inflected house music.
Titled “Daydream: Air Becomes Art,” the debut exhibition at the Seaport space will feature works from a fairly impressive roster of artists: Turner Prize winner Martin Creed, whose contribution consists of a see-through balloon-packed greenhouse; Germany’s Karina Smigla-Bobinski, her piece described (terrifyingly) as a “charcoal-spiked, helium-filled sphere”; and, most remarkably, Marina Abramovic, the doyenne of durational performance, represented here by Snowy/Windy/Spring on Planet Z, a pneumatic re-creation of a snowy meadow recalled from the artist’s Yugoslavian girlhood. “We are inhabitants of the same invented planet, breathing the same impossible air,” says Abramovic. “Making this world within the language of inflatables is a perfect medium to bring it to life.”
Marina Abramovic’s Snowy/Windy/Spring on Planet Z work planned for Balloon Museum.
Photo: Balloon Museum
Karina Smigla-Bobinski’s ADA, an inflatable work spiked with charcoals that will leave marks on the floors and walls.
Photo: Balloon Museum
Photo: Balloon Museum
With reportedly 8 million visitors since Balloon Museum’s inaugural show in Rome in 2021, audiences young and old have apparently taken to its Instagrammable backdrops and inflatable playscapes, a combination the organizers are banking will work still better downtown (it will be joined sometime next year by “Meow Wolf,” the maximalist immersive exhibit also coming to Pier 17). As a prospective reinvention for the Tin Building, and for the South Street Seaport generally, the museum is only the latest — and by no means the worst — in a long succession of ambitious ideas for the area, most memorably architect Santiago Calatrava’s never-built spire at 80 South Street. The enduring, if still somewhat unaccountable popularity of immersive experiences in the city (the Color Factory! Summit One Vanderbilt!) does augur well for the new balloons on the block, who in their official opening announcement promise to provide “a new anchor to Lower Manhattan.” Take it with a dose of smoked salt.
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