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.