London’s Balloon Museum is filled with a cornucopia of fantastical, multisensory exposition exploring the relationship between art and emotions through the medium of inflatable art. It’s a pop-up that has sprouted in various capital cities around the world, including New York, Paris, Rome, Milan and Madrid, welcoming over three million people through the doors to rave reviews. The basic premise is to allow a group of artists to assemble installations that primarily make use of balloons to create highly interactive, idiosyncratic, and frequently enormous exhibits.
The lead curator, Antonella Di Lullo, is passionate about what inflatable art can achieve. “The idea is that the balloon brings everybody to the child’s age,” she said, enthusing about the installations by 20 artists, including immense inflatable rabbits, bubbles, and oversized beach balls.
In London, they’ve taken up residence at Old Billingsgate, a grand building that formerly housed a Victorian fish market next to Monument, with over 70,000 square feet to play with. Each of the artists have crafted an installation which together make up EmotionAIR. All the rooms and installations have a completely distinctive character: each one portraying a different emotion through the medium of balloons, from emotions such as fear, anger, and anxiety to joy and amazement. Indeed, the exhibits are carefully designed to elicit an emotional reaction: one room themed on anxiety features strobe lighting and static noise. A sign by another reads: “Each piece is designed to stimulate an intimate dialogue with one’s feelings, providing a unique insight into the complexity of the human experience.”
A couple of the highlights include theHype feeling installation, which is basically a colossal psychedelic ball pit. Made in the style of a swimming pool, complete with ladders, it is filled to the brim with yellow balls. A giant ball with images and sounds projected onto it is suspended above the pool and forms the focal point of the room. After donning some shoe covers, patrons are invited to jump in and ‘swim’ whilst a polychromatic light show takes place and dance music is pumped out to emulate the emotion ‘sentience’.I visited with my daughters (age six and four), and one of their friends (age seven), and all three children declared the ball pit their favorite part of the experience.
They also enjoyed ricocheting some giant black and white patterned balls hung from the ceiling around and running amok in a room filled with pumping techno music and child-sized inflatable eggs.
Another favorite was Black Hole Horizon, in which human-size bubbles get blown out by the noise emanating from some sort of speaker, which is meant to emulate the emotion of ‘expectation.’
For the tiniest visitors, Kaleidoscope – a room designed by KarinaSmigla-Bobinski featuring tables covered in backlit colored liquid and squishy clear plastic that can be prodded – was a big hit.
The final room, Balloon Street, was a series of booths to pose in for photographs: highly Instagrammable. A sign said: “Time for you to express yourself! Step into our world of inflatable art and be the artist of your own experience.” One had a set of pink balloon angel wings to stand between, another had steps leading up to a cloud of black balloons, while another was a yellow balloon festooned phone box labelled “call me”.My girls relished the opportunity to strike poses in the booths, and we left with a wonderful array of photos.
All told you could easily while away a couple of hours here, going from room to room. It’s a brilliant immersive cultural experience for adults who want to feel like a kid again and for families looking for an elevated soft play type experience.
1 Old Billingsgate Walk, 16 Lower Thames St, London EC3R 6DX
Tickets are from £32 for adults or £18 for under-15s, while a family ticket starts at £90. The exhibition runs until 14 April 2024.
