Donald Barthelme’s short story The Balloon (1960) describes the short yet marvelous life of a gigantic balloon that one day took over Manhattan’s cluttered sky. Its presence triggered many different forms of engagement amongst the city’s habitants: some reacted as if the balloon has always been part of the environment, as if it’d finally taken its rightful place on a shiny throne on top of the clouds. Others used higher buildings to do everything in their power to jump on top of it, even throwing messages at it, hoping that they might one day receive an answer. Greyson Revoir’s exhibition ‘Callus and the Crane’ at Neuer Essener Kunstverein conducts itself in a similar manner to that striking lonesome balloon.

Many of our friends and colleagues stay at home. A few of them because they are afraid of being infected, others to flatten the curve, but most of them because their jobs have been cancelled and exhibitions have been postponed. What happens to the people in the cultural world if it suddenly shuts down? What are the pitfalls and can there still be a productive potential within this crisis? PASSE-AVANT asked several friends that are affected by COVID-19 in different ways to share their perspectives. Read their stories.

A few weeks ago, Haris Giannouras visited the transformed space of Galerie Khoshbakht and wrote down his impressions on the sharp yet playful exhibition halbe sachen by Tom Hardwick-Allan & Stanislava Kovalcikova, with special attention given to the screening of Forugh Farrokhzad’s 1963 film The House is Black.