What Are You Waiting for Today

Here, mythical, religious, and pop-cultural motifs meet figures and objects that allude to catastrophe, transience, and emotion. Among the imagery are vampires, ghosts, and sea monsters, unicorns and angels, coffins and crosses, clovers, broken hearts, lightning bolts, and rain clouds. In these icons and symbols—reminiscent of graffiti imagery—etchingroom1 intertwines the traumatic with the banal and the uncanny with the tender.

The teeming, “Where’s Waldo”-like drawing on the reverse side of the stele wall combines fragments of Vienna’s urban space. In doing so, etchingroom1 situates the fragmented everyday experiences depicted on the front within a spatial context that is both specific and universal. The city is understood here as a living organism, in which exterior and interior spaces, infrastructure, and subway networks are woven into a pulsating web of perception, movement, and rhythm. It is not dramatic events but familiar moments that determine the rhythm of daily life. Yet the familiar is permeated by a subtle sense of irritation, as even the smallest deviations shift plans and interrupt routines.

The entire cycle of images refers to the war and conflict experiences of the two artists from Kyiv, while also making visible their individual strategies for coping with them. The work invites viewers, in times of multiple crises, to draw hope from the fragile balance of everyday life.

Curator: Elisabeth Hajek

In cooperation with tranzit.org/ERSTE Foundation

etchingroom1 (Anna Khodkova & Kristina Yarosh), founded in 2016 in Kyiv, is a Berlin-based artist duo working across printmaking, ceramics, textiles, and installation. In their interdisciplinary practice, they explore urban life and fragile emotional states. Selected international exhibitions include Future Fragments (ERSTE Foundation, Vienna, 2025), Everything Will Be Fine (Serpen’ Gallery, Berlin, 2024), By Heart (SEFO Triennial, Olomouc Museum of Art, 2024), and Safety Instructions (Annenberg Center, Philadelphia, 2024). In 2025, they participated in the Artists Development Programme of the EIB Institute in cooperation with neimënster and the Cité internationale des arts in Luxembourg and Paris.