Mumbai: How would you react if you saw a giant red ball at the corner of your street which has appeared from nowhere? Well, a 15-foot-tall and 250-pound giant red ball is touring all over the world from Los Angeles to Paris to Perth to Taipei.
Squeezed on to suspension bridges, stuck between buildings and wedged inside lobbies, this little bit of public art just might be the universe’s most adorable, inanimate traveler. The Red Ball is a product of Brooklyn-based artist Kurt Perschke. On his artist statement, he says “On the surface, the experience seems to be about the ball itself as an object, but the true power of the project is what it can create for those who experience it.The larger arc of the project is how each city responds to that invitation and what the developing story reveals about our individual and cultural imagination.”
Talking about the essence of the project, Perschke says, “As Red Ball travels around the world, people approach me with excited suggestions about where to put it in their city. In that moment, the person is not a spectator but a participant in the act of imagination.” The invitation to engage and to collectively imagine, says Perschke, is the essence behind the art work.
