Balloon Museum Announces New Commission by Marina Abramović SNOWY / WINDY / SPRING ON THE PLANET Z the Artist’s first Inflatable Installation

Balloon Museum Announces New Commission by Marina Abramović  

SNOWY / WINDY / SPRING ON THE PLANET Z  

the Artist’s first Inflatable Installation  

Opening July 2026

Tin Building in the Seaport, New York City

Rendering of Marina Abramović, SNOWY / WINDY / SPRING ON THE PLANET Z (2026). Image courtesy of the Balloon Museum.

New York, NY – March 12, 2026 – The Balloon Museum, the global atelier for inflatable contemporary art, is pleased to announce a landmark commission by Marina Abramović to inaugurate its New York City flagship location. The project marks the acclaimed artist’s first foray into inflatable materials. Titled SNOWY / WINDY / SPRING ON THE PLANET Z, the work constructs a multisensory dreamscape utilizing light, air, paper, and inflatables that transports viewers into a liminal environment. Created in close collaboration with the Balloon Museum’s engineering and design teams, the project marks a significant expansion of Abramović’s practice into the realm of large-scale inflatable sculpture.

“Creating this world through the language of inflatables felt like the perfect medium to bring it to life,” shared Abramović in a statement. “The balloon is, fundamentally, a childhood object. But beyond its innocence, the balloon carries a deeper philosophical charge. Its existence depends entirely on air. It is an object made from the most immaterial of substances, and yet it takes on form, weight, even personality. In this way, it is very close to performance itself.”

As she approaches her 80th birthday, Abramović explores this new medium by revisiting imagined landscapes of her childhood in Belgrade. Drawing on the vision of an extraterrestrial, snow-covered meadow, she creates an immersive environment populated by shoulder-high inflatable blades of grass.  As visitors navigate a winding path through the installation, currents of air will circulate balloon “snowflakes” into a constant flurry. The walls will emanate a soft, diffused light, producing a “whiteout effect” on the horizons and a sense of spatial ambiguity.

“We are honored to realize Marina’s vision at this pivotal moment in her career,” said Roberto Fantuazzi, CEO & Founder of Lux Entertainment, the experiential production company behind The Balloon Museum. “Our mission has always been to provide artists with the technical and conceptual expertise to explore working with inflatable art. SNOWY / WINDY / SPRING ON THE PLANET Zexemplifies that commitment.”

While she is renowned as a pioneer of performance art, air and breath have long been central to Abramović’s practice. In her 1977 performance Breathing In / Breathing Out, created with Ulay, the two artists pressed their mouths together and blocked their nostrils, breathing only the air exchanged between their bodies in a closed loop. Continuing for seventeen minutes until they approached the threshold of unconsciousness, the work explored the concept of air as both subject and medium. Almost fifty years later, and with the support of the Balloon Museum’s artistic team and computerized design systems, Abramović will revisit this medium once again, transitioning her use of air into a large-scale installation.

This commission continues the Balloon Museum’s history of collaborating with leading contemporary artists. Since its founding, the organization has partnered with more than 80 international artists, collectives, and studios working across sculpture, architecture, design, and interactive art, including Valerio Berruti, Martin Creed, Carsten Höller, Hyperstudio, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, A.A. Murakami, Philippe Parreno, Paola Pivi, Quiet Ensemble, Alex Schweder, and Karina Smigla-Bobinski. The Balloon Museum acts as a production house specializing in the medium of inflatable art, providing engineering expertise, advanced computerized design systems, and fabrication to realize installations.

SNOWY / WINDY / SPRING ON THE PLANET Z will open to the public as part of a group exhibition in July 2026 at the Balloon Museum in New York, located in the Tin Building on the waterfront in the Seaport. Further details about the exhibition will be announced in April.

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Note to Editors

A media preview will be held onsite in July before the installation opens to the public. To request access, please contact Katrina Stewart at katrina@bluemedium.com.

About Marina Abramović

Since emerging in Belgrade in the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance as a visual art form, pushing the boundaries of endurance, consciousness, and the relationship between artist and audience through landmark works. She is one of the most acclaimed and institutionally recognized artists of her generation, with major retrospectives at MoMA New York, the Royal Academy of Arts London, and museums across Europe and Asia. Her 2023 solo exhibition marked her as the first female artist in the Royal Academy’s Main Galleries as well as her forthcoming solo exhibition in May of 2026 at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. She founded the Marina Abramović Institute in 2012 and has been awarded a constellation of honors, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1997), TIME’s 100 Most Influential People (2014), the Princess de Asturias Award (2021), and the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture (2025).

About the Balloon Museum

The Balloon Museum is an international touring exhibition platform presenting large-scale inflatable contemporary art installations, and an atelier specializing in the research, development, and fabrication of inflatable artworks. Founded in Rome in 2021 by Lux Entertainment, an Italian experiential production company, the organization focuses on immersive, interactive group exhibitions that bring together leading voices in sculpture, architecture, design, and experiential art. Since its debut, the Balloon Museum has presented exhibitions across Europe, North America, and Asia, attracting more than seven million visitors worldwide. For more information, please visit luxentertainment.com/en/.

For images, further background, or interviews, please contact:
Katrina Stewart
Account Manager, Visual Arts
Blue Medium
T: +1-212-675-1800
katrina@bluemedium.com