BIOHAZARD BANDOLIER: IN-BETWEEN PANIC (2025)
Biohazard Bandolier: In-Between Panic is a lecture-performance developed by Jatun Risba in response to the cancelled presentation of their work The Intimacy of Otherness: How to Live a Life... at the Pixxelpoint 2025 festival due to institutional restrictions related to artistic content. Biohazard Bandolier was presented on 14 November 2025 at the Pixxelpoint Symposium at Xcenter, as a guerrilla lecture and critical intervention addressing the experienced silencing.
The lecture-performance engages with themes of cultural censorship, systemic pressures within contemporary art, and the role of the artist as mediator amid social supression. Drawing on broader reflections on artistic visibility, institutional hierarchies, and the politics of recognition, the work situates itself at the intersection of structural critique and embodied testimony.
The text and video of the performance lecture was published in full in its original English version on Koridor , a platform for critical cultural discourse, allowing the arguments developed in the lecture to circulate beyond the context of the cancelled event.
An integral element of the lecture-performance is a wearable sculpture composed of 26 laboratory test tubes inserted into a military-style bandolier. Each glass tube contains a mixture of organic residues, industrial remnants, bodily fragments, and human and animal secretions — matter suspended between vitality and decay, intimacy and contamination. The sealed tubes function as a material metaphor for silenced or “cancelled” artistic voices: messages contained, restricted, and denied circulation.
Referencing artistic genealogies of corporeal defiance, including VALIE EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic and Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, the work situates itself within a lineage in which the body and its residues become instruments of critique. Together, lecture and sculpture articulate a reflection on repression, transformation, and the importance of artistic and social dissent in the presence of oppression and authoritarian cultural and political tendencies.