Narrative Presences

Jasmin Schaitl

Jasmin Schaitl is an internationally active visual artist, artistic researcher, organiser and lecturer, currently associated with the University of applied Arts Vienna. For more than 10 years she has been sharing her approach to performance and participatory practices through workshops and presentations at universities, institutions and performance festivals across Europe and overseas. She has been developing artistic, performative methods that combine the sense of touch, the theme of memory and contemplative practices. Since 2021, her focus has been on participatory,  contemplative and multi sensorial formats for exhibitions/performances that allow people to actively participate, and co-create what they experience. In June 2023 she started to collaborate with Daria Lytvynenko on participative projects supporting displaced Ukrainians.

Daria Lytvynenko 

Daria Lytvynenko is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in mime and physical theater, working primarily with performance, video and installation. She addresses the audience in a provocative way, based on constant experiments with humour, satire and circus elements to voice the complexities of political and civil spheres. Since the beginning of the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine, Daria has been creating action-performances in public spaces in Vienna. In June 2023, she started to collaborate with Jasmin Schaitl on participative projects supporting displaced Ukranians.

Alina Pust

During her studies, Alina Pust specialized in biology and psychology in educational institutions. She started her artistic and cultural activities in 2017. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, she has been living in Vienna. She took part in the Dnipro Gogol Festival 2020 with a performative exhibition “Speaking Portraits”, and made performances and exhibitions as part of the events of the Kryvyi Rih NGO Poroda.

Maria Shurkhal 

Maria Shurkhal is a Ukrainian performer, educator and artistic researcher. She studied classical ballet in Kyiv and subsequently contemporary dance and performance at the university in Linz. Maria is a co-founder of an interdisciplinary art collective PUC with whom she has facilitated artistic, educational and community projects in Austria and abroad.

The international cross-border project Narrative Presences facilitates communication and artistic exchange between displaced Ukrainian communities in Ivano-Frankivsk (Ukraine), Vienna (Austria) and Olomouc (Czech Republic). It is a continuation of the project “No distance allowed” (2023), which was created as an artistic necessity – as a result of the current deconstruction of the role of art during the war and its potential to support the Ukrainian community.

Running from January to June 2024 in three cities, the project aims to contribute to addressing the current living situation of Ukrainians who have been forced to leave their homes as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

A team consisting of visual artists, educators, psychotherapists, professional dancers and performers works together with them to share their stories of escaping the war and finding a new home. The workshops create a safe space to share and prepare the final performative form.

The stories represented in the workshops and in the performances with cardboard bricks follow the journeys of people fleeing Ukraine to Western Europe. Each individual story contributes its own content and value to a potential collective healing process. The stories have different roots and fates, but the unifying idea of coming to terms with a “new home” and a “new reality” brings us closer together. Through initiated, controlled working with memory, our and “their” presences meet for a moment. Again, art is engaged.

The SEFO 2024 Triennial wants to be that safe space for direct participants in the shattering moments of the present. Thanks for the opportunity to participate to the artistic association Collaboration: Interdisciplinary Performance and Art Projects (CPAP), affiliated to the Angewandte Performance Laboratory (School of Arts and Crafts, Vienna). MetaLab, a collaborative project of CO-HATY (UA). The project has been awarded one of 10 international cooperation grants from the EU co-funded Culture Helps / ZUSA Culture programme.