Vienna Time

Vienna’s contemporary art scene often feels like a meeting point for biographies that do not fit neat national labels, and our conversation with artist, curator, and researcher Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair makes that friction visible. From her studio in Vienna, she traces how being born in Moscow, migrating through Germany, and building a life in Austria produces layered identity rather than a single stable category. That matters in artistic research, because when we ask who is “speaking” about Ukraine, Russia, or Europe, we are also asking what privileges, blind spots, and responsibilities travel with the speaker.

Her long-term work around Lviv begins with chance and intensifies with history. A formative trip in 2010, shaped by performance work across Eastern European cities, left her with a sense of tension in Lviv’s public space, especially around Second World War monuments and memorials. After 2014, the need to understand how war reshapes narratives becomes urgent, leading to an extensive collaboration and field research that asks a deceptively simple museum studies question: if a Museum of War were built in Lviv, what would it look like? The answers reveal that monuments and memorial sites gain meaning through people’s actions, not through stone alone.

This is where performativity, cultural memory, and commemorative rituals become a powerful lens. Ekaterina describes public gatherings as unwritten scripts: who speaks, which music is played, how bodies move, and why certain dates matter. Those repeated choices teach communities what counts as history, and they quietly organise belonging. Language is central too, because inherited terms carry ideology. Tracking phrases, slogans, and narrative roles exposes how historical memory is shaped, distributed, and policed, especially in post-Soviet space where competing pasts coexist in the same square.

A striking thread is the clash between heroic myth and victim testimony. In Western European memory culture after the Holocaust, the moral frame often turns on witness, perpetrator, and complicity. In Soviet historical imagination, the key opposition remains hero and enemy, producing a vocabulary that struggles to name victimhood without converting it into sacrifice. Ekaterina points to a ceremony where Holocaust victims are praised as heroes, not because grief is absent, but because the available narrative demands triumph. The result is emotionally sincere and politically loaded, showing how a society’s “usable past” can narrow even the language of mourning.

Her practice also moves beyond documentary film into objects, drawings, and works on paper that function like visual poetry. Childhood images of tanks and sausages reappear as “Panzerwurst”, connecting private memory to present militarisation and propaganda. She returns repeatedly to children and adolescents because they echo what adults circulate but refuse to say plainly, revealing the collective subconscious of a culture. A film made in Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, shows students adopting a Jewish narrative without being Jewish, a precise example of identity as performance shaped by place, funding, and institutional storytelling. Across all these works, the question remains: when lived trauma hardens into abstract myth, who gets to use it, and to what end?

A painting can look like a celebration and still hold a private storm. We meet Vienna-based visual artist Alfred Bow in his flat-studio, surrounded by huge canvases, tulle, and colour that refuses to behave. He tells us why he doesn’t identify as a “painter” and how moving between painting, sculpture, textile, performance art, and music helps him stay honest to the work.

We follow the thread of mythology and spiritual process: images that appear, creatures that feel like bridges to the more-than-human, and a canvas treated as a room of possibilities. Alfred talks about “masks”, about the ideas society builds and then mistakes for truth, and about using art to push back against fear of the unknown. If you care about contemporary art in Vienna, queer art, and what creativity looks like beyond theory, this conversation gets specific about how it’s made and why it matters.

Then we go straight into colour and costume. Think drag makeup on canvas, neon greens, cherry reds, pop culture sparks from The Matrix to Queen, and the carnivalesque freedom of dressing up. We also unpack a practical studio tactic with emotional weight: covering parts of a painting with fabric, turning errors into conscious layers, and letting the work carry both power and vulnerability. Finally, Alfred shares how he’s building performance and music videos as “soundscapes” of his paintings, translating visual density into collaged sound experience.

Who watches whom when the trees stare back? We sit down with visual artist Elena Kristofor to trace how a childhood between sea and steppe collides with the dense, watchful woods of Austria, and how that tension fuels a practice that blends analogue photography, sculpture, and site-responsive installation. Elena shares the visceral experience of moving through the forest at walking speed, camera at her belly, layering multiple exposures onto a single negative to compress an entire path into one image—then carrying that print back among the trees to let balance and breath draw a second line across the surface.

From there, the conversation opens onto the Mongolian Gobi, where the horizon runs unbroken and the body relaxes into radical openness. In that empty sweep, Elena works with mirrors, slicing space into reflective shards that challenge the camera’s central gaze. Think cubism for landscapes: thin spatial slices rearranged so you see more than one side at once. We talk about why disrupting single-point perspective matters, how Western habits of looking are not neutral, and what happens when sculpture and photograph meet in high wind and bright light.

Back in the studio and gallery, branches become actors, not props. Self-portraits face a precarious pile ready to fall. Tree portraits stare back like witnesses. Hybrid figures—half human, half tree—emerge from a chance moment in the steppe, evoking something mythic and tender. We follow Elena into fog-thick exhibitions that erase sightlines so visitors must feel their way, engaging balance and breath as part of seeing. Threaded through it all is a candid admission: the inner conflict between early inscriptions of endless steppe and later marks of forested Austria, a split that refuses to resolve and instead powers the work’s urgency.

If you’re curious about analogue processes, environmental art, landscape interventions, or how place writes itself into the body, this conversation offers clear methods and resonant ideas you can carry on your next walk. Listen, share with a friend who loves landscape, and leave a review to tell us which world shapes you more—steppe or forest.

What if the future feels dangerous and tender at the same time? We sit with visual artist Beáta Hechtová to wander through her post‑collapse worlds, where faceless figures grow thorns, bodies melt beyond gender, and cultures are rebuilt through ritual and care. These scenes are not about escape; they are about returning to empathy, crafting belief systems from scraps, and finding a way to belong amid uncertainty.

Beáta introduces the idea of “futuristic folklore,” a living myth that fuses sacred plants, drifting liquid energies, and ceremonies formed after a fall. The last orchid sealed under glass becomes a relic worth protecting; bubbles hover like new ideologies or digital spirits; and an unknown light source glows just out of reach, pulling characters forward. Her colours carry the rainforest’s heat and saturation while her surfaces slip toward a digital smoothness, echoing VR’s cinematic skies and the soft shimmer of post‑internet light. The effect is immersive: paintings that feel screen‑born and sculptures that invite touch, from fluffy tentacles to carnivorous forms lit from within.

We explore how hope works as a practice rather than a promise. Nature pushes back, technology liquefies into belief, and desire refuses to die. Beáta traces influences from neo‑surrealism to contemporary installation, shares plans for whale‑bone scale and soundscapes, and reflects on why she might choose to live inside the worlds she paints. The result is a conversation about adaptation, community, and the art of holding beauty and threat in the same frame.

If you’re drawn to contemporary art, neo‑surrealism, speculative futures, and the meeting point of ecology and technology, this journey will stay with you. Listen, subscribe, and leave a review to tell us: which part of humanity would you carry into a new world?

portraits and interviews, generational storytelling, photography as performance, photography and stage design 

A photograph that appears in a dark room, breathes for a minute, then vanishes when the lights come up. That’s the tension at the heart of our conversation with photographer and multimedia artist Franzi Kreis, whose practice merges portraiture, sound, stagecraft, and drawing to explore how personal stories become collective memory.

We start with Generation Beta, an evolving archive where daughters speak about their mothers and sons about their fathers. Franzi traces the project back to recordings made as her grandmother’s memory faded, and explains how talking “around” the self reveals the self. From Vienna to Cairo, Sarajevo, Rome, and beyond, the work invites people to place their lives in a wider frame of history, politics, care, and change. The result is intimate and political at once: a humane record of pattern-breaking, continuity, and the choices that shape the next century.

Then the darkroom doors open. In Dunkelkammer for "Die Scham" at Vienna’s Volkstheater, Franzi turns analogue development into live performance. The audience watches an image materialise brushstroke by brushstroke, only for some prints to be sacrificed to light. It’s photography as event rather than artefact, insisting that memory is partial, time-bound, and honest about loss. That same sensibility fuels Tribulaun backdrop, a 13-metre stage design born from a single medium-format negative captured during a fleeting sunrise on the Tribulaun. The story of the chase becomes part of the picture’s meaning, touring with the Herbert Pixner's project From The Dark Side Of The Alps to major concert halls.

We close with Franzi’s return to drawing through a sold-out comic on Pixner’s life, and a look ahead to Buenos Aires, the next destination for creating a new chapter of Generation Beta. If you’re curious about intergenerational storytelling, analogue craft, and performance that gives photographs back their soul, this one’s for you.