Bambi van Balen ~ Keywords: dreaming, healing, attention, magic, techno shamanism, emergence, commoning, art activism, artivism, intervention, ritual, witchcraft, inflatables

Bambi van Balen (formerly known as Artúr van Balen) (NL/HU) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and educator living and working between Rotterdam and Berlin. Having roots within climate activism, they founded the group Tools for Action to explore more experimental, poetic ways of engagement on the intersection between art and activism. Tools for Action develops (inflatable) tools for assembly, holds skillshare workshops and realises large scale participatory performances and spatial interventions within an environmental, anti-fascist, queer, educational and performative arts context. They lately focus on communal dreaming as a healing practice and as a complement to collective action.

Van Balen co-curated Floating Utopias, an exhibition about the history of inflatable art, architecture and activism at the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin (nGbK, 2018) with stops at the Art Science Museum in Singapore (2019) and Kunsthalle Lund ( 2020). Their sculptures, installations, videos and performance works have been shown and developed in collaboration with Fondazione Sandretto (Turin, 2022), NDSM werf / Amsterdam Dance Event (2021), Theatre of Rotterdam (2021, 2022), Hellerau-European Centre of the Arts (2019), Kulturprojekte Berlin (2018), 7th Moscow Biennale (2017), Wiener Festwochen (2017), Theatre of Dortmund (2016). They lectured at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2021, 2023), the Architectural Association (2021), Sandberg Institute (2021, 2022) and the Willem de Kooning Academy (2020).

Learn more about Bambi van Balen's written MA thesis (DAI, 2022): Enchantment and Resistance, How To Dream Together.

In 2021 Bambi van Balen was a member of the DAI's COUNCIL and a representative of the DAI's student body within the ArtEZ Participation Council.

Follow Bambi's "Life after DAI" via website: www.toolsforaction.org, Instagram: bambi_van_b  and Instagram: toolsforaction