KATYA GRANOVA

"Out of all fictional devices from sci-fi, I always wanted to get a time machine. Being brought up on the ruins of the Soviet Union, I witnessed how the rapid changes in the mass ideology are shaping the collective memory. People’s perspectives on their past became very different and any coherent history turned out to be impossible. It brings one to wonder - can I trust even my own memories? If the my past experiences and knowledge form my present and future, my ideas and beliefs, how can I allow them to be so non-trustworthy? 

Old photographs or paintings are the closest available replacement to the time machines. However even the most mundane of them are still extremely biased and selective. 

My painting practice is based on an effort to approach the past, condensed in its images-documents, not just visually, but in a full-bodily visceral act, bringing my presence into the image through the bodily act of painting. Getting the outline of the image projected, I paint it over, intruding, changing and fictionalizing the original, trying to build my own subjectivity in the image."

My approach to painting can be seen as a speculative archaeology of the pre-existing image or an alchemical effort to bring a dead image to life with the my body  presence and its dissecting gestures - just as surgery does. As any collective past operates just like a closed country, open to any speculative reading from the outside, my practice uses the same method as the one of the child drawing oven pictures in magazines, bringing their presence in it, but not pretending to fake it into something else and serve some ideology. This desire to intrude on the body of the past with my own corporeal presence brings me to a bigger scale, where painting becomes the physical act or even a dancing interaction between myself, the photograph, the brush marks, the viewer's gaze, and the past I'm dealing with.