not as it appears - EXHIBITION REPORT

Solo exhibition by Jatun Risba at Funkhaus Wien [8–20 April 2026]

What if the body is not what we think it is?

What if illness is not only something that happens to a body, but an opening through which we might reconsider what a body can know, become, exchange, and regenerate?

And what if what appears to be matter—blood, urine, chlorophyll, soil, breath—is never merely material, but carries histories, relations, memories, and possibilities?

These questions shaped not as it appears, Jatun Risba’s exhibition at Funkhaus Wien in April 2026. Conceived as a Via Sanitatis—a path towards health, the exhibition brought together performance, photography, video, print, and process-based installation to investigate the unstable territory between body and environment, illness and transformation, human and more-than-human life.

The presented artworks, many of them new or shown publicly for the first time, formed a journey through different materials, media, and temporal manifestations of an ongoing artistic inquiry into embodiment, perception, regeneration, and interdependence.

The body as a site of knowledge

At its centre stood the artist’s magnum opus, The Intimacy of Otherness: a transmedia performance lecture bringing together autobiographical narration, contemplative practice, embodied research, and questions emerging from neuroscience and biomedicine.

At Funkhaus, the work expanded beyond the live event. Large-scale photographs of the performance became artworks in their own right, while an artist’s book extended the performance into another temporal and spatial register.

From the intangible more-than-human matter explored throughout The experience of invisible matter shapes the way we approach reality to the ecosomatic gestures of Casting Sun and Oxygen for a Collective Rebirth, and the intimate testimony of Bath Talk, the exhibition brought together different ways in which lived experience can become a receptacle of the numinous.

When the body becomes material

In UroeliXir, the body becomes both laboratory and archive.

For 48 consecutive days, the artist collected and ingested their own morning urine and immediately made a Polaroid portrait, allowing the face to become a daily register of an otherwise invisible bodily encounter. The work deliberately enters territory that contemporary culture often asks us to conceal: bodily waste, taboo, disgust, intimacy, and autophagia.

The work belongs to Risba’s broader research into what they call the six life matters on Earth: air, water, carbon, soil, chlorophyll, and menstrual blood.

Blood, chlorophyll, breath

Throughout not as it appears, bodily fluids moved between human and more-than-human systems.

Red Drops used menstrual blood within a process-based installation constructed from medical tubing, a surgical device, and sterile bandaging. The work brought together bodily vulnerability, global violence, ecological entanglement, and the Tibetan tantric notion of the red drop—without collapsing these distinct systems of meaning into one another.

In Life-Breath, menstrual blood gave way to liquid chlorophyll. Circulating through the tubing of a medical breathing mask, the green pigment became a vegetal analogue of blood. It functions as a reminder that the oxygen human life relies upon is continuously produced through the metabolism of other living beings. Here, breath is never exclusively human. It is a vital substance connecting us to the wider web of earthly life.

Transcending the flash, becoming tree

Other works moved the body directly into relation with vegetal life.

In Damp Green, Risba covered their body in liquid chlorophyll and pressed it onto a fallen tree trunk in Panovec Forest, producing a full-body monoprint on cotton. The body temporarily became a printing instrument; the tree became both support and co-author.

Earthbound Transfiguration returned to an earlier performance, Be-coming Tree (2020–21), in which Risba’s body was repeatedly placed in stillness on an uprooted beech tree across the seasons of the pandemic.

What began as an individual livestreamed performance subsequently developed into the Be-coming Tree Global Live Art Events intitative, bringing together more than 100 artists across six continents during the pandemic.

The movement between these works is significant: from body to tree, from individual to collective, from screen to ecosystem. The body does not simply disappear into nature. It be-comes a relational field for thinking and living other-wise.

The exhibition as a path

At Funkhaus, these works were brought together as a path rather than a linear chronology. not as it appears asked visitors to move between different scales of experience: the intimate and the planetary, the microscopic and the ecological, the personal and the collective, the visible and the imperceptible.

The exhibition proposed that transformation does not necessarily mean transcending the body. It may instead mean becoming more attentive to the extraordinary complexity already taking place within and around it.

This is also where the exhibition’s title becomes a proposition. not as it appears did not oppose the realm of immediate appearance. It worked as an invitation to look again, and deeper — to attend to what perception habitually filters out. Some of this remains unseen simply because it is too intimate, too ordinary, or too material. Some of it is too slow to register, too uncomfortable to hold, or too entangled to fit within the dominant frameworks through which reality is made legible.

A living research practice

The exhibition functioned as a convergence of several research trajectories that Risba has been pursuing through transmedia performance art, Art & Science, contemplative practice, posthumanist thought, and embodied research.

Here, the bodymind is not only the subject, but an instrument of inquiry, an art medium, an archive, an inner and outer ecosystem of relations, and a site of experimentation.

The exhibition also included a Study Corner, presenting a selection of academic papers published by Risba over the past five years and offering visitors a direct entry point into the research that underpins the artistic practice.

The exhibition culminated in an Art & Neuroscience conversation bringing together perspectives from art, neuroscience, art history, and Art & Science research. The panel featured Jatun Risba, neuroscientist Claus Lamm, art historian Paolo Sanvito, and Art & Science expert Sonja Schachinger, moderated by ORF journalist Tina Goebel. Their discussion explored intersections between neuroplasticity, embodied experience, empathy, situated knowledge, ecosomatics, and the transformative potential of artistic practice, opening a dialogue between different disciplines and ways of knowing.

Exhibition details

Jatun Risba — not as it appears
Solo exhibition with performances
8–20 April 2026
Funkhaus Wien, Vienna, Austria

Vernissage with live performance: 8 April, from 19:00 on
Guided tours: 10, 12 & 18 April 2026
Finissage and Art & Science conversation with : 20 April 2026

The exhibition was supported by Funkhaus Wien, SKICA – Slovenian Cultural Centre in Vienna, Italian Cultural Institute Vienna, Arion Creative, New Life Contract, Tip95, Science Meets Art, Shifei, and Never At Home.