A painter appears in Vienna with a film degree, a restless curiosity, and no plan to become a painter at all, then ends up building a body of work that stares straight into the canon and talks back. Sitting in her studio, I speak with Barbara Moura about how a self-taught artist finds a voice in a city loaded with art history, and why her canvases feel so charged with story, staging, and emotion.

We dig into her fascination with Old Masters like Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi, and the decision that changes everything: using self-portraiture to place a woman’s face inside masterpieces that have long defined “mastery” as male. We unpack chiaroscuro and the cinematic pull of dramatic light, but also the deeper idea behind it for Barbara: darkness as a universe, a metaphor for shadow work, mystery, and the parts of ourselves we need to face if we want to evolve.

The centrepiece is her major project responding to Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy. Barbara explains why she calls Caravaggio the punk of the Baroque, how his chaos becomes a mirror for today’s fractured world, and why the acts of mercy still read like an urgent checklist for human life. From mythology as a source of power, to her Danube series that reconnects femininity with nature, to Dante’s Inferno reframed through modern disconnection, this conversation keeps returning to one question: what does it mean to make art that tries to make us more human?

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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.