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

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.

On 28 June 2026, Jatun Risba presented Be-coming Substrate as part of Framing Air: A 24h Performance Program, curated by Lital Dotan at Glasshouse Project, New York, during the Upstate Art Weekend.

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.

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.

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.