When the inner-German border was established, West Germans would attach leaflets and magazines — and subsequently books too — to gas-filled balloons installed with a timer mechanism that dropped them in the GDR if wind conditions were favourable. In the absence of any contextualization, the balloons could be many things: a child’s plaything, land art, a performative installation, a meteorological measuring instrument, or even a means of broadcasting political concerns. Balloons juxtaposes photos from the Stasi archives with texts in the form of logs documenting the flight of the transport balloons and the consequences of their landing. The images in the compilation vividly convey everyday life in the GDR: a litany of smashed roofs, torn power cables and destroyed leaflets; a routine existence that might have looked this way or something like it.

Jens Klein, b. 1970 in Apolda, lives and works in Leipzig. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including at the Folkwang Museum Essen, the Villa Stuck and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. He has received, among others, the Documentary Photography Award of the Wüstenrot Foundation, a working scholarship from the Kunstfonds Bonn and the DZ Bank Scholarship 2021 / 22.