Vienna Time

One dancer’s life can map an entire city’s shifting relationship with art, politics and the body. We sit down with Liz King, a Royal Ballet School graduate who chooses a different path, moving from classical ballet into contemporary dance and physical theatre, then helping to reshape what dance could be in Vienna. Liz takes us from the chalk hills near Salisbury and an early love of theatre to the discipline of Royal Ballet School training under the watchful eye of Madame Ninette de Valois. W...

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 ...

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...

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-...

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 o...