Artúr Van Balen

Action artist, performance artist – Berlin, Germany
Participant International Forum 2018

Artúr van Balen examines the overlaps between visual arts, performance and activism and founded the group “Tools for Action” in 2012. With Tools for Action, he gives participatory skill-share workshops to art- and activist groups and even to schools, demonstrating how to build inflatable sculptures and use them for political actions. Furthermore, he conducts research in Russia and the United States about the development of inflatable art and technology, especially in the 1930s. He organises actions and participated at numerous exhibitions and conferences, such as steirischer herbst (“Truth is Concrete”, 2013), Media Impact (Art Play Moscow 2013), at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (“Disobedient Objects”, 2014), the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (“Life in post-artistic times”, 2016), at Schauspiel Dortmund (“Mirror Barricade”, 2016) and at the Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art (“Metamorphose”, 2017). In 2017, he received the prize for arts education of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM-Preis für Kulturelle Bildung) for his project “Mirror Barricades” together with Schauspiel Dortmund.