Lecture
That it's all just a little bit of History repeating
Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair
17/03/2026, 15:00
VALIE EXPORT Center Linz
In her artistic practice, Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair is engaged with questions of collective memory, historiography, and the visual manifestation of ideologies in built and social spaces. She works across a range of media, from graphic works and video to installations. Analytical seeing is her main tool for understanding the world around her. In her artist talk, she will present her approach to art as a dynamic and explorative activity, using selected works as examples.
CV
Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair is a visual artist, researcher, and curator based in Vienna. Between 1999 and 2009, she studied painting and sculpture in Nuremberg, Berlin, and Vienna, and completed her PhD in Philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2022. Her dissertation was awarded as the best academic work of the academic year. Since 2017, she has been running the independent art space hoast in Vienna in collaboration with Wolfgang Obermair.
She has exhibited in Austrian and international galleries, museums and institutions, such as Gallery 5020, Salzburg (2026, 2012), kunstraum pro arte, Hallein (2025), Venice Biennale / Croatian Pavilion (2024), Belvedere 21 (2023), Vienna, Studio PRÁM (2023), Prague, Engländerbau, Vaduz (2022), Kunstverein Eisenstadt, Eisenstadt (2022), Ravnikar Gallery Space, Ljubljana (2020), Gallery Georg Kargl Permanent, Vienna (2019), Museum of Western and Oriental Art Odesa Ukraine (2019), Jewish Museum Vienna (2017, 2015), TAXISPALAIS – Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2017, 2015), Ani Molnár Gallery, Budapest (2016), Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest (2014), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2014), and Secession, Vienna (2010). She is a recipient of awards such as Theodor Körner Prize, Austria (2017), Chimera Art Award, Budapest (2015), and a grantee of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York (2014). Furthermore, she has been involved in several extensive research projects, among them the exhibition “Soviet Modernism 1955–1991. Unknown Stories” for the Architekturzentrum Wien (2011–2013).
She is currently a fellow at the VALIE EXPORT Center, Linz.