In June 2026, Jatun Risba attended an Artist-in-Lab programme at the Université de Montréal, undertaking training in molecular sequencing techniques and bioinformatics analysis within the Laboratory of Molecular Ecology and Evolution, under the supervision of Professor François-Joseph Lapointe.

The training programme provided theoretical and practical grounding in molecular methods for microbial DNA extraction and sequencing, next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies and platforms, bioinformatic processing and analysis of microbiome datasets, statistical and network analysis of microbial communities, and the visualization and conceptual interpretation of microbiome data within interdisciplinary Art & Science research. The residency has broadened Risba's research into urine and urinotherapy, opening up new perspectives and milieus that will inform the further development of their work with body fluids and neuroregeneration. It has also laid the groundwork for a collaborative project with François-Joseph Lapointe, to be realized as a next stage of the work undertaken together during the Artist-in-Lab residency.

Alongside the lab training, Risba was invited by Dumaine Létourneau to give an artist talk at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal), sharing their artistic and research-based practice with performance art students.

The one-month training program in Montreal was supported by the Slovene Ministry of Culture's scholarship programme for specialized professions in culture.

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

What if dis-ease 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 first 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 visceral. 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 2026
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.

Dreamfield is a site-specific artwork comprising an outdoor or indoor installation, ritual accessories, and a participatory performance that activates the field of aspirations.

The development of the work begins with an exploration of the local geographical, ecological, and cultural landscape, which informs the creative process. In the days preceding the performance, the artist clears the ground, removing stones, grass, litter, and weeds, and digs the soil to prepare a fertile terrain. The performance area is then demarcated using upcycled wooden desks painted blue. In the Baltimore iteration, a row of upcycled clay bricks was laid behind the wooden desks, completing the installation.

Inspired by Arnold Mindell’s concepts of the dreambody and the field from The Shaman’s Body (1993), the work invites participants into a state of active imagination in which body, matter, collectivity, decisions and future potentialities become temporarily entangled.

Dreamfield creates and holds a space for transindividual embodied dreaming, where inner processes are externalized through gesture, movement, and contact with soil. Through ritual participation within a safe environment, each participant is invited to identify limiting psychological, emotional, or energetic conditions and transform them into acts of conscious transition. Participants enter the field individually and follow a process facilitated by the artist-sorcerer. At the end of the performance, the artist sows arugula and flower seeds into the soil. The plants are later harvested and consumed, completing the cycle of life and death.

The project premiered at The Compound, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, in July 2026, as part of Stuttering is Echoing, Chapter 3 of the Silver Baits, Silver Archives exhibition curated by Rui Jiang.

Bodies in Tension is a participatory live performance investigating the migrant body as a site of negotiation, interdependence, displacement, vulnerability, and collective agency within public space.

The artist’s body is extended through elastic straps worn on the limbs, reaching into the surrounding public space. Passersby are invited to take the straps and collectively negotiate the performer's movements, transforming spectators into active participants. Every gesture, enacted or suspended in its potentiality, emerges through shared tension, cooperation, hesitation, and care, redistributing agency, responsibility, and the dynamics of control.

Presented across several locations in Venice over the course of a single day, the performance unfolds through a series of brief interventions that move across the city's streets, bridges, and squares. Each intervention functions as a social choreography, activating a distinct relational poetics between bodies, space, and collective action. The work asks: Which invisible forces shape migration, intimacy and togetherness? When do regulations on movement or decency function as support, and when do they become instruments of control and oppression?

The evening iteration responds to Venice’s municipal codes on public dress and bodily exposure, as well as Italian Penal Code articles 726 and 527 on acts contrary to public decency and obscene acts in public, turning the law into the work’s point of tension. It questions how legal regulations, visibility, and collective freedom are negotiated in the city’s public space.

Bodies in Tension was presented within PERFORMATICA 2026: Corpus Migrante, an independent performance festival in Venice curated by Hector Canonge and organized by INPA, the International Network of Performance Art, in parallel to the 61st La Biennale di Venezia.

+ Post photo by Hector Canonge.

Jatun Risba's new peer-reviewed article, "Vital Materiality in the Art Film Series A Tree Doesn't Fall Far From the Mountain", has been published in the latest issue of Amfiteater: Journal of Performing Arts Theory (Vol. 14, No. 1, 2026), dedicated to Ecology and the Performing Arts.

The paper examines the four-part art film series A Tree Doesn't Fall Far From the Mountain (2022–2023), co-created with Franco G. Livera, alongside its accompanying Live Art screening events, Poetics of Relation. Drawing on performance studies, new materialism, eco-aesthetics, and Édouard Glissant's philosophy of Relation, the article explores how performance-based filmmaking can cultivate embodied ecological awareness, foster more-than-human collaborations, and propose new participatory models of artistic production and collective world-making.

The publication originates from the international symposium Ecology and the Performing Arts, held in the autumn of 2025 at the Slovenian Theatre Institute in Ljubljana (SLOGI).  This special issue, edited by Dr. Maja Murnik, brings together thirteen contributions by international scholars and artists and is dedicated to the memory of philosopher and new media theorist Janez Strehovec.

Imaginatio unfolds as a participatory performance that deepens Risba's ongoing research with bodily fluids, particularly urine and urea, approached as carriers of transformation, memory, and exchange. In the Christian contemplative tradition, imaginatio refers to practices of inner transformation through which the subject undergoes a process of mental recalibration, dissolving perceived boundaries between self, Other, and the sacred.

The performance unfolds as a participatory action. Audience members are invited to engage voluntarily by urinating or pouring prepackaged urine onto the artist’s body, as the artist lies semi-naked at the beginning of a five meter long royal blue cotton fabric. The work explores vulnerability, stigma, devaluation of natural resources, reciprocity, and embodied interdependence.

As the fabric dries, these traces become perceptible primarily under ultraviolet light, akin to the star scattered night sky. At the conclusion of the performance, UV lamps are distributed among the audience, enabling observation and contemplation of the collectively produced work...the print of a collective cosmic body.

The premiere presentation of the work occurred on July 2, 2026 at the Shivastan Poetry Ashram: Book Store, Art Gallery & Giftshop in Woodstock, NY. The event was co-curated with Adam Zaretsky and BEAK (Bioarts Ethical Advisory Komission).

During their artist-in-residence stay in New York City, Jatun Risba met artist, educator, and chaplain Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo. Their encounter sparked an in-depth conversation on performance, ecology, Buddhism, BioArt, and embodied artistic practice, now published on Nicolás's online platform, The Interior Beauty Salon. Read the full interview here.

This spring and summer, Jatun Risba brought two workshops rooted in their long-term embodied practice to audiences in the United States.

Interesse: embodying blissful emptiness

Interesse was a one-day immersive somatic workshop held at PMT House of Dance in New York City, co-hosted with Nini Mai. Through authentic movement, rhythmic breathing, vocal expression, and deep listening, the workshop invited participants into a space of grounding, release, presence, and collective attunement. Drawing on Tibetan yoga and breathing practices, as well as Grotowski's physical training methodologies, it offered practical tools for nervous system regulation, emotional release, resilience, and self-healing.

Together, participants moved through states in-between: consciousness and subconsciousness, self and others, life and impermanence — through guided somatic exercises, spontaneous movement and vocalization, breathwork, witnessing practices, and moments of stillness within motion. Interesse has been Risba's daily practice for several years, and one that profoundly shaped their relationship to body and health — it is the practice through which they found their way back to transcend the condition of multiple sclerosis (2012–2019).

Interesse & Calm Mind: Somatic Practice and the Arts of Liberation

The second workshop was a collaboration with fellow USA artist John DiLeva Halpern, presented by the Institute for Cultural Activism International at Jade Lake Retreat in East Meredith, NY. Where the first workshop centered Risba's own practice, this one was a genuine two-artist encounter: Risba and Halpern each drew on their own lived experiences of self-healing to offer accessible approaches to resilience, somatic awareness, and transformation through movement, breath, voice, and calm abiding.

Two very different paths, arriving at a shared conviction that the body itself holds the tools for its own liberation. Structured around contemplative somatic and vocal exercises drawn from Tibetan lineages and somatic training, the workshop invited participants to explore body, sound, and meditation as pathways to healing and creativity — Risba's somatic instructions and movement work opening the body's self-healing forces, paired with Halpern's Shiné (Calm Abiding) meditation cultivating the relaxation and focus needed to sustain that awareness.

Be-coming Substrate marks the fourth development of Risba's ongoing Be-coming series (Be-coming Tree, Be-coming Cow, Be-coming Space). In this new durational performance, a glass panel functions simultaneously as surface, membrane, and window, mediating a gradual embodied transformation toward and into the soil. Accompanied by the continuous recitation of a Buddhist healing mantra, the work explores permeability, impermanence, and the relational boundaries between body, material, and landscape.

Be-coming Substrate was part of Framing Air: A 24h Performance Program, on June 27- 28, 10 a.m.- 10 p.m., curated by Lital Dotan at Glasshouse Project, New York, during the Upstate Art Weekend.

Framing Air brought together six interdisciplinary artists whose site-responsive performances examined notions of ecology, ritual, migration, transformation, and the ephemeral within the unique setting of Glasshouse Project in New Paltz, New York.

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.