Most art magazines operate on a familiar model: a critic or journalist writes about an artist's work, interpreting it, contextualising it, explaining it to the reader. Balcony does none of that. This biannual publication is built entirely around conversations with artists — not profiles, not criticism, not career retrospectives, but the everyday exchanges that happen when you sit down with someone and talk about their life, their process, and whatever else comes up.
The distinction between a conversation and an interview might sound trivial, but it changes everything about how the magazine reads. Interviews have an agenda. Conversations have a rhythm. Balcony is interested in the rhythm — the digressions, the silences, the moments when an artist says something they did not plan to say. By refusing the conventions of art criticism and artist profiles, the magazine creates space for a different kind of intimacy: the kind that comes from two people talking without a predetermined destination. The reader is not told what to think about the work. They are given access to the way the artist thinks about it themselves.
The format also produces a different kind of knowledge. Where a traditional profile filters an artist's thinking through the writer's interpretation, a Balcony conversation lets the artist's voice come through unmediated — which is almost always more interesting, more contradictory, and more revealing than any critical framework could manage. The result is a publication that feels unusually honest, because it is. Nobody is performing expertise. Nobody is constructing a narrative. Two people are just talking, and the reader gets to listen.
The title suggests a threshold space — neither fully inside nor fully outside, a place where private and public life overlap. It is an apt metaphor for what the magazine offers: a vantage point from which to observe the creative life without the barriers of institutional language or critical apparatus. Balcony trusts that the most interesting thing about an artist is not what a critic makes of their work, but what they make of it themselves.