Marina Abramović explores inflatable art at Balloon Museum

The Balloon Museum, which is opening its first permanent location in New York later this year, has commissioned a large-scale inflatable sculpture from Marina Abramović to inaugurate its flagship space.

It marks Marina Abramović’s first time exploring inflatables as an artistic medium, according to the Balloon Museum. The artist is best known as one of the founders of performance art, particularly for works that push the endurance limits of the body.

Abramović collaborated with the museum’s engineering and design teams to create the sculpture, titled Snowy / Windy / Spring on the Planet Z.

Roberto Fantuazzi, founder and chief executive of Lux Entertainment—the Italian experiential production company behind the museum—praised the collaboration in a statement.

“Our mission has always been to provide artists with the technical and conceptual expertise to explore working with inflatable art,” Fantuazzi said. He said the Abramović collaboration “exemplifies that commitment.”

The company has previously partnered with more than 80 international artists, collectives, and studios, including Martin Creed, Carsten Höller, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Philippe Parreno— providing engineering expertise and fabrication support.

The 79-year-old artist said the installation revisits the landscapes she imagined as a child in Belgrade, Serbia.

“As a child, I imagined a place far beyond our own sky. A planet with its own weather, its own atmosphere, its own logic entirely. It was my own version of science fiction,” Abramović said in a statement. “How did it feel on this planet? Was it snowy, windy, or could you sense the first green breath of spring —I called it Planet Z.”

The work depicts an extraterrestrial, snow-covered meadow with 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 museum said in a news release. “The walls will emanate a soft, diffused light, producing a ‘whiteout effect’ on the horizons and a sense of spatial ambiguity.”

Abramović said inflatables are the “perfect medium” to bring her childhood imagination to life, calling balloons “fundamentally a childhood object.”

“But beyond its innocence, the balloon carries a deeper philosophical charge. Its existence depends entirely on air. Without air, there is nothing. No volume, no color, no presence,” Abramović said. “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.”

Abramović’s art has explored the concepts of air and breath as far back as 1977, when she and her then-partner Ulay first performed Breathing In / Breathing Out. In that performance, the two artists pressed their mouths together and blocked their nostrils, breathing only the carbon dioxide exhaled by the other until they nearly passed out 17 minutes later.

“When you blow air into a balloon, you perform a version of this. You give something of yourself to an object that holds it briefly. The balloon is performative. It is temporary. And when it deflates, or pops, or simply drifts away, it leaves nothing behind,” Abramović said.

“This is precisely what has always drawn me to performance: it exists completely in the present tense, and then it is gone. Only the memory in the body of the witness.”

The installation will open to the public as part of a group exhibition in July 2026 at the Balloon Museum in New York, which recently announced it would open in the Tin Building.

The Tin Building was constructed in 1907 as part of the sprawling Fulton Fish Market, which for nearly 200 years anchored New York’s wholesale seafood trade along the East River until the fish market moved to Hunts Point in the Bronx in 2005.

The structure was flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and ultimately restored and reopened as a food hall by celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten in 2022. Vongerichten announced the food hall had closed on February 23 after three years of operation.

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