Following a successful run during Manchester International Festival 2023, Yayoi Kusama’s You, Me and the Balloons exhibition has extended its opening hours at Manchester’s new landmark cultural venue.
Tens of thousands of people have visited this major new installation by the celebrated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and had the chance to see inside Aviva Studios, Factory International’s flagship new venue, ahead of its official opening in October.
From Friday 4 August, visitors will now be able to experience the spectacular exhibition, Kusama’s largest and most ambitious immersive environment to date, on Friday and Saturday evenings, with tickets now available from 7.30pm and last entry at 9.45pm.
Full price tickets are £15 with concessions available. The exhibition is on view until 28 August 2023.
A free programme of family activities inspired by You, Me and the Balloons will run throughout the summer, from dance workshops, upcycling, craftmaking and other self-led learning activities led by local artists, makers and creators.
On Saturday 5 August, audiences can get a curator’s insight into the exhibition and Kusama’s life and work with an illustrated talk by Phoebe Greenwood, Curatorial Associate at Factory International, and Katy Wan, Asistant Curator at Tate and curator of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms.
Designed especially for Aviva Studio’s vast new Warehouse space, You, Me and the Balloons brings together for the first time a collection of Kusama’s most significant inflatable artworks from the past 30 years, most of which have not been seen before in the UK. The exhibition is the first large-scale UK presentation of Kusama’s work since her acclaimed retrospective at Tate Modern in 2012.
You, Me and the Balloons invites visitors to immerse themselves in Kusama’s psychedelic universe as they journey through a colourful landscape of large-scale inflatable sculptures, many standing over 10-meters-tall or suspended from the 21-metre-high ceiling. A giant pumpkin, inflatable dolls, mirrored spaces and polka-dot spheres are among the well-known motifs featured in the show.
In an interview for the exhibition catalogue, Yayoi Kusama said: “It would be interesting if people would experience the show as a wonderland. The experience of the scale is what’s important. Inflatable works expanded my creative means in terms of scale that could not have been achieved by stuffed soft sculptures, and the freedom of placing them up in the air.
“For me, the world is genuinely full of surprises. It is not that I want to inspire a childlike awe or wonder, but to inspire through my genuine perception of the world.”
Entering the exhibition, a tunnel leads visitors into a new iteration of The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity will Eternally Cover the Universe (2019), a maze of large-scale biomorphic balloons rising floor to ceiling. Stairs within the installation lead up to a roof platform offering panoramic views of the exhibition before descending into the main Warehouse space.
Included is Kusama’s first balloon series Dots Obsession (1996/2023), reimagined for the 65-metre-long Warehouse as a constellation of large inflatable polka-dot shapes suspended in mid-air. In Dots Obsession (2013), visitors can enter one of Kusama’s renowned infinity mirror rooms located inside a large red inflatable dome.
The exhibition features Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict (2007), a video projection showing Kusama singing about her experience of depression, and a new presentation of the artist’s inflatable Clouds (2023), which has been created especially for the installation. Positioned on the floor, these soft sculptures invite visitors, for the first time, to sit or lie on the works. In the colossal work A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe (2021), which spans over 11 metres in length, visitors can immerse themselves in an inflatable forest of giant glowing pink tentacles.
Kusama’s career spans eight decades and she is widely recognised as one of today’s most important living artists. Her signature motifs and materials, such as repeated polka dots, brightly coloured pumpkins and kaleidoscopic Infinity Mirror Rooms have transcended the traditional art establishment to become part of global popular culture
