Jatun Risba: not as it appears

Funkhaus Wien
8. 4. – 20. 4. 2026

not as it appears is a solo exhibition by transdisciplinary artist and researcher Jatun Risba (SLO), exploring the evolving relationships between body, environment, and perception. The exhibition unfolds as a Via Sanitatis— a path of embodied inquiry into themes of health, neuroplasticity, and multispecies reciprocity, informed by ecofeminist practices, queer ecology, and posthumanist thought. Through performance, photography, video, and graphic works, the exhibition invites the audience to reflect on what is seen, felt, and known beyond appearances.

At the core of the exhibition is The Intimacy of Otherness— an extensive intermedial work developed over three years (2023–2025). The performance lecture is grounded in Risba’s personal experience of successful self-healing from multiple sclerosis (2012–2019). The accompanying works guide visitors through different dimensions of identity and embodiment, and their transformations toward a more-than-human understanding of the self.

With support from: Funkhaus Wien, Slovenian Cultural Centre in Vienna (SKICA), Italian Cultural Institute in Vienna (IIC), Arion Creative, New Life Contract, TIP 95, Science Meets Art, Shifei, and Never At Home. Photographs: Franco G. Livera

DATES AND LOCATION

Opening:  Wednesday 8 April, 7:00 pm, performance teaser at 8:00 pm (15 min, three repetitions)

Exhibition: 9–20 April 2026, open daily 3–6 pm and by appointment.

Performances – The Intimacy of Otherness (60 min): 10 April, 12 April & 18 April at 20:00. Reservation required. Limited to 25 participants.

Finissage: Monday, 20 April, 7:00 pm — Art & Science meeting with the artist, guests, and audience.

Location:
Funkhaus Wien, Argentinierstraße 30B, A-1040 Vienna

Jatun Risba celebrates two  consecutive special mentions for the quality of artistic research and the inclusion in the shortlist for the CREA Open prize.

The shortlist represents about 10% of  participants (this year 4,021 artists from 110 countries). Big congratulations to the 25 finalists who will exhibit at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo Venice from April 8, 2026 on.

Tableau Vivant was an exhibition and performance project presented at k48 – Projektraum Oliver Hangl in Vienna in March 2026.

The exhibition unfolded as a constellation of works centered on body-printing, material transmutations, and post-digital and ecological reflection.

The main installation, Tableau Vivant (2026), consisted of a double-sided UV-printed cloth depicting a disfigured world map of contemporary armed conflicts, challenging the dispositif and power structures embedded in the medium of cartography. One side presented a materially unstable map of ongoing violence, while the reverse side carried body prints produced through embraces with audience participants using menstrual blood and liquid chlorophyll. The cloth was subsequently treated with a urea solution, initiating crystallization processes that gradually formed mineral-like structures across the surface.

The exhibition also included the artwork Casting Sun and Oxygen for a Collective Rebirth (2024), a body-printing performance documented through a single-channel video (7:05 min) and two body prints on incontinence sheets. The performance brought together menstrual blood and liquid chlorophyll as what the artist terms “life matters”, staging a ritual gesture of regeneration grounded in ecological interdependence.

Red Drops (2026) was an installation composed of a medical dissection kit, the artist’s menstrual blood, and a sterile medical bandage. The work evoked global and historical violence while drawing on the concept of the “red drop” from tantric subtle-body cosmology, placing it in dialogue with ecological philosophy and ideas of material entanglement, vulnerability, and compassionate interdependence.

Inhale Life (2026) was a spatial installation of A4 glossy prints generated through intentionally miscalibrated printing commands, producing glitch-like tonal instability and semi-transparent surface effects. The work explored the aesthetics of error and the fragility of digital authority, while referencing the vibrant matters used across the exhibition.

Love Is Who You Are (2026) was presented as a vitrine inscription functioning as a secular litany and ethical counter-motto. The text extended the contemplative dimension of the exhibition by proposing a horizon of ecological reciprocity, care, and radical imagination.

Together, the works formed a reflective environment addressing corporeality, violence, transformation, and more-than-human interdependence through performance, installation, and material research.

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.

In 2025, Jatun Risba participated in TTT2025 / TABOO – TRANSGRESSION – TRANSCENDENCE in Art & Science in Ljubljana with two projects: The Intimacy of Otherness and eliXir.

The Intimacy of Otherness was presented as a 60-minute multimedia performance lecture. At TTT2025, in Kino Šiška, the work was shown in its complete format for the first time, with all three acts performed together as an integrated structure. The project builds on the artist’s long-term research into embodiment, vulnerability, and systemic power relations. Grounded in lived experience, it examines how intimacy and otherness are socially constructed within medical, sociopolitical, and cultural frameworks. Combining spoken text, voice, and visual material, the performance operates as a critical reflection on interdependence, difference, and relational structures.

In parallel, eliXir was presented as an art–science–technology initiative developed on the xMobil platform. The project engages local foraging practices, ecological experimentation, and community-based knowledge exchange, addressing food autonomy and resilience through participatory formats.

Together, the two projects contributed to the program by foregrounding embodied knowledge, ecological awareness, and collective processes of inquiry.

The exhibition eliXir: rewild • reinvent • replenish marked the closure of a nine-month-long research art–sci–tech project titled eliXir that took place on the xMobil platform. xMobil is led by pETER Purg, produced by Mojca Stubelj Ars (GO!2025, Xcenter) and was part of the official program of the European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica - Gorizia.

The project eliXir was developed and led by Jatun Risba in collaboration with Uroš Brezavšček and Vita Matjač (Floravita) and in dialogue with the environmentalist Anton Komat. It intertwined local foraging, artistic practice, ancient wisdom practices, and modern technological innovations, while connecting communities through the exchange of knowledge about food. The project aimed to activate local audiences in the development of new (r)evolutions. In doing so, it opened up spaces for meetings, dialogue, and collective creation, where novel connections between humans, ecology, and technology were tested.

Through interactive installations, performative practices, and open laboratory situations, visitors were invited to participate – from gathering and preparing food to experimenting with materials and energy sources. In this way, eliXir went beyond the framework of a conventional exhibition and established itself as a dynamic process in which scientific curiosity, cultural heritage, and creative imagination intertwined, and where each contribution — whether practical, aesthetic, or reflective — became an integral part of a shared (r)evolutionary flow.

PRELUDE

"Point-blank, your urine is the result of your own love." (Sugata)

Urine—an intimate and often overlooked substance—has been revered in ancient traditions such as Ayurveda and the yogic practice of Amaroli (1) as well as in modern urotherapy (2), where it is used for medicinal, cosmetic, and spiritual purposes. In Tibetan Buddhism, urine is regarded as one of the “five nectars”: “human feces” (dri chen), “urine” (dri chu), “menstrual blood” (rak ta), “semen” (khu ba), and “marrow” (rkang mar). These vital elements are used in Indian and Tibetan tantric rituals of purification, transformation, and spiritual empowerment. The five nectars correspond to the five elements (earth, water, fire, air, and space) as well as the five skandhas (mental factors of clinging) (3).

(1) International Association of Yoga Therapists. (n.d.). Amaroli: An Ancient Practice – Bibliography and Resources. Retrieved from https://cdn.ymaws.com/iayt.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/bibliographies-members/amaroli.pdf

(2) Van Der Kroon, Complete Guide to Urine Therapy, https://urotherapyresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/pdf/complete-guide-to-urine-therapy-.pdf

(3) Tony Chui, “Secret Medicine” in the Writings of Sanggyé Gyatso: the Encoded Esoteric Material of Therapeutics, in Knowledge and Context in Tibetan Medicine (Brill, 2019).

ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND ARTWORK

uroeliXir is a 48-day (25.6.25–12.8.25) photo-documented research performance with and by Jatun Risba, exploring the effects of drinking one’s own morning urine on the bodymind. After performing a pH test and ingesting their first morning urine, the artist takes a Polaroid portrait that captures their expression and appearance (their inner motions) immediately after the act. A sample of midstream morning urine (from the one ingested) is collected each day as a form of material documentation—an example of radical mattering with the aim of de-tabooing and bringing urine back into the fabric of contemporary life.

The Significance of 48 Days: Three Cycles of Tranformation

The uroeliXir project unfolds over 48 days (one Mandala in the Indian yogic system) that can be divided into three phases of 16 days each, marking distinct stages in a complete cycle for physical and energetic transformation. It roughly corresponds to the time it takes for cells in the body to renew and for new habits to form at a physiological level. (4)

• The first phase supports cleansing and detoxification, where the body and mind begin to release toxins and old patterns.

• The second focuses on adaptation and strengthening, as the system integrates the practice and shifts towards balance.

• The third emphasizes consolidation and deeper transformation, stabilizing the new state of harmony and vitality.

(4) Sivakumar, T. & Palaniappan, M. (2017). Therapeutic use of urine in traditional systems of medicine and modern clinical practices: A review. Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine, 7(3), 354–360. Retrieved from ScienceDirect.

*uroeliXir was developed as part of the collaborative art-sci-tech research project eliXir, developed by Jatun Risba in co. with Uroš Brezavšček and Vita Matjac (Floravita) and produced by the xMobil platform from Xcenter Nova Gorica, part of the official GO! 2025 program for the European Capital of Culture Nova Gorica-Gorizia.

The Intimacy of Otherness is a durational transmedia multisensory performance lecture by and with Jatun Risba, exploring their radical self-healing from multiple sclerosis (2012-2019) through guerrilla art interventions, dances of urgency and the use of various bliss-inducing techniques. These practices included clubbing, (self-)hypnosis and erotic expression. In the first act of the work, the artist shares their lived experience while lying in stillness on vertical tree logs. By echoing their seminal performance Be-coming Tree, the artist embodies and unveils qualities that need to be cultivated in order to transform the seemingly “impossible” (healing, etc.) into an “I’m possible” reality.

Developed  over three years (2023–2025), the artwork unfolds in three acts, each conceived annually as a deepening stage of the journey. The third and  final act, How to Live a Life..., emerged from Risba’s artistic research  during the Peripheral Visions residency with the association  IoDeposito, in the context of Nova Gorica–Gorizia 2025 European Capital  of Culture. It premiered in June 2025 in an air-raid shelter in Udine, Italy, providing a resonant historical backdrop for the work. This closing chapter responds to the historical and contemporary challenges—relational, human, and ecological—of inhabiting a cross-border territory, offering a poetic, embodied, live-spoken response to the complexities of identity, belonging, and interdependence.

A  wooden scenography, The Spiral of Life, crafted by the Italian design and furniture company New Life Contract in dialogue with Risba, interacts with the artist during the  performance. In a continuous cycle of composition and decomposition,  each gesture contributes to the building of a collective ground, where  every part is entangled in a sensitive whole and every deviation becomes  regenerative. Every fissure is a breath, a glimmer of light—and so on,  into infinity.

The production of How to Live a Life... was financed by the European Union as part of the Small Project Fund GO! 2025 of the Interreg VI-A Italy–Slovenia 2021–2027 Programme, managed by the EGTC GO.  With gratitude to Franco G. Livera for the photo and video documentation of the work.

Revisit the earlier acts of The Intimacy of Otherness through this link.

Jatun Risba participated for the third time in the Re-connect Art Festival—an event dedicated to performance and multimedia art in Prague, Czechia—held for the first time at the historic Veleslavín Chateau from 5 to 15 June 2025.

During the festival, Risba premiered a new participatory eco-art performance titled Microdosing of Magic (2025), a poetic and sensorial ritual composed of seven performance instructions. The work invites participants to re-connect, heal, and rewild their relationship with the more-than-human world.

Microdosing of Magic was re-enacted at Sajeta Art&Music Festival in Tolmin, Slovenia on the 4th of July as art of the eliXir triple workshop.

The 6th YslandBook / YnselBuch – Blood is online, published by Schmiede / Akademie Hallein, Austria.

Jatun Risba was one of the contributors together with: Dr Anju Sunny BAMS, Dr. Bernhard G. Förg MBA, Dr Herbert Limberger, Jiabao Li, María Angélica Contreras, Rüdiger Wassibauer,  Ryder Cooley, Thomas Grusch, Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter.

Risba’s chapter, entitled Blood and Chlorophyll as Self-Destroying Devices: Annotations of an End Journey That Has Yet to Begin, is a hypertext that presents the author's artistic, mediatic, experiential, and esoteric exploration of two selected mediums: menstrual blood and liquid chlorophyll.

The book is available for print-on-demand orders at the link provided above.

Jatun Risba is pleased to announce their co-authorship of Chapter 7 in the upcoming scholarly volume: Practice Research through Creative Bodies: Perspectives on Embodied Inquiry, edited by Caroline Frizell and Marina Rova (Routledge, 2026).

Chapter 7: Processes Evolving in the Wood Wide Web of Be-coming Tree
by O.Pen Be (AKA Penelope Best), Danièle J Minns, and Jatun Risba.

This chapter offers a collective reflection on the evolving practice of Be-coming Tree—a global live art platform exploring interspecies connection, ecological restoration, and embodied presence through collective performances with and in relation to trees. Set within a broader collection that brings together pioneering voices in artistic and somatic research, this publication is a rich contribution to the growing field of embodied inquiry.

The book will be released at the beginning of 2026. Discounted preorders are available here.

Y Gallery, Ljubljana | 24 April – 25 June 2025

Jatun Risba took part in the group exhibition SKRB: When Rivers Weep…, curated by Jernej Čuček Gerbec at Y Gallery in Ljubljana. The exhibition featured three distinct artistic approaches exploring grief, kinship, and multispecies care in the context of ecological and hydrological collapse.

Jatun presented the collaborative work Crows in Dead Olive Groves (2023), created in collaboration with Franco G. Livera. The piece meditates on the mass die-off of olive trees in Apulia due to the Xylella fastidiosa epidemic, embodying a crow as a witness and mourner in a ravaged landscape. The work was exhibited as a video, two large-format prints on Alu-Dibond, and an installation comprising the crow costume used in the performance. During the Ljubljana Art Week, Risba & Livera premiered the Crows in Dead Olive Groves photobook (2025), offering a deeper, immersive lens into the project’s narrative.

Alongside this artwork, the exhibition included Bitter by Martina Miño Perez and the sonorous experiential work Voluminous Movement of a Watery Earth by beepblip.

A video review of the exhibition featuring the curator Jernej Čuček Gerbec was released by the YT channel Sodobna Umetnost, an online platform for contemporary art:

In March 2025, Jatun Risba was invited to deliver an artist talk and workshop at the Department of Intermedia and Digital Media, Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica in Slovakia.

The talk, entitled The Medicinal Power of Art, presented Risba's artistic journey of exploring art as a transformative and medicinal force. Drawing on their experience of  overcoming Multiple Sclerosis through somatic, artistic, and spiritual  practices, Jatun conextualized the body’s innate intelligence, the neuroplastic power of altered states of consciousness and the potential of performance art as a tool for (self-)liberation and transpersonal healing. The presentation included reflections on selected artworks, performances and participatory projects created between 2009 and 2025, inviting the audience to experience art as a space of active listening, radical presence, and collective resilience.  

The talk was followed by a 2-day somatic workshop Interesse: The embodiment of blissful emptiness that introduced participants to the practice of Interesse that includes authentic movement and vocal expressions in an exalted state of hyper-awareness. The application of breathing techniques, Tibetan yoga exercises and Grotowski's physical training offers a basic structure and support for the practice. Interesse promotes a deep state of relaxation where people are able to move from subconscious behaviours to conscious living, to be present in the moment and in the flow.

Through prolonged embodiments of trance (expanded awareness) states, achieved through Interesse practice, Jatun Risba managed to rewire their thinking body to the point of overcoming Multiple Sclerosis (2012-2019). Jatun has been a daily practitioner of (Tibetan) Yoga and Vajrayana Buddhism since 2019.

The performance Contemporary Myth Meeting: Evolution of species is a new development of the ongoing, long-term art project Personal Observer (2015–present) by artists Jatun Risba (SLO) and Adam Engler (SK). Personal Observer explores the transformation of the individual from a compulsive thinker into a responsive, silent observer engaged in thoughtful action and attentive to what is. The  first work in progress presentation of the performance Contemporary  Myth Meeting was held at Záhrada - Centrum nezávislej kultúry in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia on the 26.03.2025.

Their summer 2024 encounter in Slovenia became a journey into Jatun’s earliest memories and sites of wonder. Amidst this return to childhood, Jatun began engaging with their grandmother’s Kosmodisk, reinterpreting it as both a body extension and a magical prop. Kosmodisk is a Slovak invention that became a global phenomenon, especially in the health and wellness field. This product was introduced to the market in 2003 through television commercials. With its simple application and pain-relieving effects, it quickly gained popularity in various countries. This once upon a time cult medical device was transformed by the artists into a conduit for artistic and performative exploration. Through this process, it blurred the boundaries between memory, the body as a site of becoming other-than-human, and the unseen forces of the natural world.

This exploration first took shape in a series of photographs captured in the wild places of awe in Jatun’s birthplace. The project then continued with an additional photo-video session in a mirrored room within Jatun’s flat, further expanding the visual and conceptual dimensions of the work.

In March 2025, Jatun Risba received a Special Mention for the Quality of Artistic Research, awarded by CREA OPEN 2025, organized by CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo Venice, Italy.