Bodies in Resonance

Artists: Yana Bachynska, Anna Mutschlechter-Dean, Serhii Petlyuk, Diana Derii, Transcultural Emancipation, Erwin Wurm.

Curators: Yana Bachynska and the Videocity team.

The program brings together works that form a constellation of perspectives on fragility, perception, and resilience. Presented within public cultural spaces, the videos become part of their existing environments, unfolding over time rather than as a single, isolated event. Through these artistic approaches, the body is evoked as a site of memory and as a terrain unsettled by political, ecological, and intimate forces. Shattered forms and wounded surfaces echo with gestures of repair, while acts of slowing down and touching insist on presence within overlooked spaces. Environmental shifts register not only as global catastrophe but also as lived affect/anger, sadness, urgency, shaping how we move and imagine futures.

Rather than aligning into a single voice, the works remain in tension: fragmentation beside immersion, resistance beside vulnerability, personal space beside planetary collapse. What connects them is a refusal of closure, an attention to thresholds where beauty and damage, care and alienation, empathy and exhaustion coexist. Together, the contributions open a space for viewers to dwell in this unsettled terrain, not to resolve it, but to stay attentive to how transformation unfolds in bodies, environments, and collective imagination.

Undertaking a brief Lviv tour, this video art programme introduces the Videocity’s public format of city trail. The Videocity initiative is dedicated to the research and dissemination of video art. Founded in Basel in 2013 by Dr Andrea Domesle and 2021 in St. Pölten together with Dr Walter Seidl, Videocity has evolved into an international network of curators and artists with a predominantly young team, whose practices revolve around socially engaged themes and interventions of video within urban spaces. During Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the initiative showcased solidarity with Ukrainian artists and institutions, further strengthening its collaboration with them and showing their works in Austria, UK, Germany and Switzerland and since 2024 in Ukraine.

Videocity projects are organized by two registered non-profit associations: zollfrei, since 2011 based in Basel, Switzerland, and Danube Trackback, since 2021 based in Lower Austria.  Both associaitons have received support to collaborate with Ukraine artists: Yana Bachynska was awarded a three-month scholarship in 2023 by the Federal Ministry Republic of Austria, Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport. Yana was also part of a cross-border digital exchange between Ukrainian artists and the Videocity team initiated by Artlink and supported by Pro Helvetia.

This programme is concepted by Yana Bachynska. It is the second Videocity project in Ukraine organized by the Lviv based artist.