Artist

Artúr van Balen

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© Daniella Hefter

Artúr van Balen (*1983, Budapest) explores the intersection between visual art, performance and activism and founded the group Tools for Action in 2012.

With Tools for Action he gives participatory workshops for artist and activist groups and recently also for school students. The workshops teach how inflatable objects can be built and used for political action.

In 2017, he received the Prize for Cultural Education from the German Federal Ministry of Culture and Media for the project Spiegelbarrikade together with Schauspiel Dortmund. In 2018 he co-curated the exhibition Floating Utopias, about inflatable art and the utopian imagination at the new Society for Visual Arts in Berlin.

For the festival SCHAUSTELLEN! at Burg Hülshoff, he collaborated with Tomás Espinosa to build an inflatable jackhammer. The inflatable object is a reference to a May Day parade in Moscow, 1938.