Gunmetal Grey

Balloons, Artist Breath

NCCA Artist in residence

Kronstadt (Kotlin Island) Russia

2015

The artist’s installation features gunmetal-grey balloons, purchased at a shop in St. Petersburg, whose colour inadvertently matches the weathered hue of the military relics scattered across Kronstadt Island. Once a formidable naval base, the island now displays decommissioned war objects as monuments to its defensive past, creating a landscape steeped in solemn remembrance. This accidental colour match becomes a deliberate gesture: the balloons, fragile and festive, are placed in direct dialogue with those weighty symbols of conflict.

The choice of balloons introduces a deliberate paradox. Balloons ordinarily signify celebration, lightness, and joy, yet here they intrude upon a space defined by defence, terror, and loss. The artist juxtaposes these irreconcilable associations to expose the absurdity of how war is framed—as glorious, heroic, or necessary. By confronting the monumental with the ephemeral, the installation proposes that the official language of victory and sacrifice is just as ridiculous as the work itself. The audience is invited to question the narratives that transform instruments of destruction into objects of respect.

The timing sharpens this critique. The artist’s residency coincided with the 70th anniversary of Victory Day, the commemoration of Nazi Germany’s capitulation to the Soviet Union at the end of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945). The project was realised in association with the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the National Centre for Contemporary Arts.