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Katya Granova uses historical photography not as testimony, but as a critical terrain for interrogating the past. Born in the final years of the Soviet Union, amid the collapse of its ideological structure, and raised in the 1990s amidst narrative voids, rewritings, and contradictory memories, her research is situated in a space of friction between private memory and collective history, where the photographic image loses its documentary status to become a device of activation.
Her practice is based on the use of photographs dating back to before her birth, including family archives, anonymous images, and ordinary scenes excluded from the monumentality of official history. She intervenes on these surfaces with the pictorial gesture, inserting her body into a time she has not lived. Painting acts neither as restoration nor as commemoration, but as intrusion: a physical presence that alters the image and disrupts its supposed neutrality.
In this process, the gesture becomes an act of appropriation and resistance. Not to photographic reproducibility per se, but to the idea of a linear, objective, and concluded history. Figures, objects, and architecture coexist on the same plane, removed from any visual hierarchy, while pictorial abstraction coexists with the photographic element without being subordinated to it.
Through this constant confrontation between presence and absence, existence and non-existence, Granova’s work questions the way we construct the past and relate to loss. Photography thus becomes a threshold: not a place of truth, but a space of tension in which the contemporary subject can grapple with what has been, without claiming to possess it or correct it.
Your birth at a time of profound historical transition—between the collapse of the USSR and the rewriting of its narratives—has shaped your imagination. When did you realize that this “narrative void” would become the core of your artistic research?
I was actually born even before the USSR collapsed—though at 2.5, I wasn’t exactly filing political commentaries. But nothing collapsed neatly anyway. Soviet narratives didn’t fall; they slowly unravelled, like a very long, very depressing magic trick.
The Russian 90s were a full-blown fever dream: extreme poverty alongside brand-new oligarchs, mafia power alongside emerging spiritual gurus, some queued for Big Macs, some for humanitarian aid. The past was just as unstable as the present. Your grandparents would insist the USSR was paradise (everyone authentic, everything cheap); your parents couldn’t find one good word for it, wholeheartedly embracing their new jungle-style capitalism, state crimes declassified, propaganda lingering, conspiracy theories multiplying like cockroaches in our communal kitchen.
School history books changed often enough that no one bothered keeping up with who the ‘good guys’ were anymore. If the 80s generation learned to live with constant lies and restrictions, mine grew up in narrative chaos—a pile of mismatched fragments posing as history, with nothing solid to stand on, nothing to navigate a young life by.
Would I have realised this was unusual if I’d stayed in Russia, happily simmering in the soup of my generation? Of course not. Only after living abroad and meeting people whose childhoods weren’t Yury-Gagarin-meets-Looney-Tunes did I understand how deeply this atmosphere shaped my entire operating system, and, therefore, my art. History is never truly objective anywhere, but my experience made me acutely aware of that – and paradoxically hungry for something solid in the past, however impossible to find.
I discovered my family’s old photographs almost by accident. No one ever introduced them to me, and I found them only when sorting through my grandfather’s office after he passed away. Incorporating them into my practice, I realised that I became unprecedentedly expressive when painting over their enlarged copies. These photographs became a bridge between my personal past and a larger historical consciousness.
Later, I started working with flea-market and archival photographs as well. The same quality unites them: too ordinary to have been staged, too banal to bother faking, they feel like the most trustworthy crumbs of the real, objective past. Stories get rewritten, memories fade and warp, no testimony stays stable—but these do. So working on them becomes a speculative act of reclaiming agency: rebelling against imposed narratives and against the past’s inevitable subjectivity.
You often work with photographs found in flea markets or from your family archive. How do you choose an image to rework? What draws you to one visual fragment over another?
There are a few criteria. First, the photograph has to predate my birth—it must contain a past I couldn’t possibly witness. It also has to feature ordinary people in everyday situations. Famous faces and historic moments already have enough visibility, and I’m drawn to what history tossed aside, the moments that ended up in flea-market bins or at the bottom of someone’s drawer.
Then there must be some emotional connection—perhaps it’s my family, and I miss those people, perhaps the scene resonates with my own experience, perhaps I’m drawn to that particular time or place.
There must be people. I’m an ex-psychologist, and inevitably, everything I care about revolves around human existence, for better or worse. Which means: absolutely no landscapes. But no grand solo portraits either. A single face often acts like a narcissist, dragging all the attention to itself. I need at least two people, preferably three or more, and some objects, or a building, so the eye can roam the whole scene and not get trapped psychoanalysing one person. Everything matters equally; they’ve all vanished into the same past, so why should one face dominate over a doorway or a shoe?
I prefer scenes where people are caught in a moment of action rather than posing, though those are hard to find. And the photographs must be black and white. I choose the colours, not the camera. That’s where I bring myself into the scene.