Balcony Gallery, 2020
Outdoors installation, Zagreb, Croatia
Balcony Gallery began during the COVID-19 lockdown, when my apartment balcony became the only available exhibition space. Visible from the street but inaccessible to visitors, it offered a way to continue sharing art while museums and galleries remained closed. The first exhibition consisted of two of my own watercolor paintings. Soon after, I began inviting artists to exhibit on the balcony, transforming a private domestic space into a small public gallery.
Over the following months, the balcony hosted a series of exhibitions by artists working across different countries and disciplines. Passersby could encounter the works during their daily walks, while the exhibitions also reached audiences online through documentation and virtual openings. Emerging from a moment of isolation, Balcony Gallery explored how a temporary and ordinary space could foster artistic exchange, visibility, and community under extraordinary circumstances.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
Balcony Gallery at the Cosmoscow Art Fair, Moscow, 2020
Organized by the Cultural Creative Agency with the support of the Embassy of the State of Qatar to the Russian Federation.
Following its inception in Zagreb during the 2020 lockdown, the Balcony Gallery continued to evolve as a nomadic, artist-run exhibition space that adapts to changing contexts rather than occupying a permanent location. Its reconstruction at the Cosmoscow Art Fair shifted the project into a new setting, where it both participated in and subtly questioned the conventions of the commercial art fair. By introducing the intimate scale and informality of a domestic balcony into a highly structured marketplace, the project proposed an alternative model of exhibition-making grounded in collaboration, mobility, and experimentation rather than institutional permanence.
This presentation expanded the Balcony Gallery's collaborative format. Muromtseva assumed the roles of artist, curator, and gallerist, exhibiting her own work alongside projects by Evgenia Eremina, Margo Ovcharenko, Alexander Anufriev, and Varvara Grankova. Portraiture provided the conceptual thread linking the exhibition, while the gallery itself functioned as both an exhibition and an institutional proposition: a portable platform that can emerge wherever the artist finds herself, challenging fixed notions of where art is shown, who organizes it, and how artistic communities are formed.
Photo credits: Ivan Erofeev
