I started my art career rather late – I graduated in Social Psychology at St Petersburg State University (2010) and after was employed as a medical psychologist in a Hospice in St Petersburg. Somehow my experience as a medical psychologist was rather transformative and eventually led to higher commitment to art practices and painting in particular. After I have studied on MA Art & Space at Kingston University(2013) London and did the one-year Certificate in Fine Arts at Paris College of Art (2015). That was followed by three years of the independent multimedia artistic practice in Russia – during this period I did over 6 solo shows, big curating project as a part of the Moscow Biennale for Young Art, two art residencies in Serbia and Norway, some international summer schools and became a founding member of the Moscow-based APXIV performance art collective, where I am still active. Then I decided to come back to studies in the particular domain of painting and started MA Painting at Royal College of Art (2018-20), which is about to be over in June.
My practice deals a lot with the concepts of history and the past. Being born in the Soviet Union, I have been growing up surrounded by the massive diversity in people's perspectives on Soviet past, leading to the complete impossibility to have any coherent picture about what was actually going on in everyday life. I also witnessed the changes in the history - in my lifetime I’ve seen the ideological replacements of the perspectives over past events at least three times - Soviet, post-collapse and contemporary Russian. I ended up feeling that if history is so biased anyway, I need to make my own one, and if I cannot travel into past and check it myself, I will fictionalise it absurdly, not following any ideology, in order to have my presence in it.
As a child I had a practice of of drawing over pictures in magazines, photographs and whatever material with pictures of people. Not necessarily mocking them, I liked to paint it over, adding something new. This practice of painting over combined with the reflections on the history as an ideological tool brought me to my current practice. I take imagery, documenting the past, project it on canvas in order to completely change and fictionalize it. I mostly take images from the faraway past before my birth with the events I cannot possibly have my personal experience of. Quite often I use family archive photographs.
Painting thus becomes a space for an intrusion into someone's past, which I do with my body as a painter. This brings me to a bigger scale, where painting is a physical act or even a dancing interaction between myself and the document of the past I'm dealing with.
Katya Granova https://grart.net/g/ (b.1988, Leningrad, USSR).
