dissonance heritage — juergenmuenzer

Dissonance Heritage
Kyiv/Vienna, 2026
Ongoing project containing performances, exhibitions, art in public space and workshops

In collaboration with Daria Lytvynenko, the residency program “You are missing here” by Dariia Kuzmych, Maria Shurkhal, Clemens Poole and the Kyiv based collective CTO.

When you walk through Vienna, you might find yourself in a square with an obelisk — a monument to the Soviet soldier, known among locals as the Russendenkmal (Monument to the Russians). In the Meidling district, there is also a commemorative plaque on the facade of a building where Joseph Stalin stayed during one of his brief visits. These monuments are directly tied to the so-called liberation of Austria from Nazism by Soviet forces. They are enshrined in the 1955 State Treaty, which still legally obliges the city to maintain them.

Daria Lyvynenko, Maria Shurkhal and Jürgen Münzer engage with the practices of decommunisation and spontaneous memorialisation in Kyiv's public space, building a dialogue between these different contexts — Vienna and Kyiv — and the contradictions of both preserving and rewriting the meanings of specific monuments from the past. Within the residency "You Are Missing Here", artists delve deeper into the local context of memorialisation and, through sculpture, video and performative interventions, develop counter-narrative artistic forms that open up space to uncover and reflect on the role of Soviet heritage in Western Europe and Ukraine. In Jürgen's words, to trace the origins of how Soviet symbolism was formed and embedded, and the living experience of dealing with it, to open a dialogue around the Heldendenkmal in Vienna.

The Kyiv phase of the project involves Daria Lytvynenko and Jürgen Münzer (May–June). In the Vienna phase, they are joined by Maria Shurkhal, who is working on a zine and the project's public presentation.

Text and poster by Dariia Kuzmych
Photos: Polina Polikarpova

Workshop activities

Within the framework of the project, a two-day performative workshop was held on June 6 and 7, led by Daria Lytvynenko, as part of the @youaremissinghere residency.

Together with the participants, Lytvynenko looked for comfortable and uncomfortable places, in the body, in space, in one's relationship to personal experience. Participants shared personal stories, reflected, and moved in the public space. Attention was paid to where tension and pain build up, and to working with that; finding these states and letting them go. Conversations turned to where we come from and where we're heading, to social and private existence. Moments were archived and notes taken, to have something to return to and continue the practice further.

Photos: Olena Brodzynska

Workshop. What we carry ahead

As part of the educational program "Lab 207. Open Studio," Jürgen Münzer led a workshop for creating cardboard head pieces.

A headpiece is an unstable thing. It has to be carried on the head, and finding balance while wearing it is funny part of the work. The object decides how we move before we do.
While building, we pose some questions to ourselves: What are we carrying around with us? How do we carry it? Or is it the other way — does the thing carry us or are we carried by it?
We can also think about what the object shows and hides from our body, from our face. How does it interact with our movement when walking, turning, holding still?

The works where presented in the exhibition “Place of Action” at Imagine Point Gallery Kyiv organised by LAB 207, Spiegelhand Residenzen, the NGOP Nahirna22 and supported by the Goethe-Institut Ukraine.

Photos: courtesy by the artists

This project is supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture OeAD and Ukraine Office Austria.