Shadows and Gestures: A Journey through Time by artist Katya Granova
From post-Soviet chaos to family archives, painting invades ordinary images, transforming them into thresholds of memory and presence
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.
You often talk about the “imprint of your body” within the image. Do you think of gesture as a form of reparation, rebellion, or reappropriation of the past?
Rebellion and reappropriation, yes. Reparation, no. I’m not a conservator with tweezers and noble intentions. I’m taking these moments and making them partly mine, forcing my way in uninvited. Gesture is my tool for breaking in, if you like. By ‘gesture’ I mean the movement of the hand that produces a brushstroke. The qualities of that stroke—its speed, pressure, rhythm, and character—are dictated by who I am, how I feel, and what I am craving at that moment.
This bodily trace becomes a kind of prolonged presence. A brushstroke can outlive the person who made it for many centuries. Take Faiyum mummy portraits: their artists have been dust for two millennia, yet their gestures remain fully alive. If that’s not rebellion against our linearity of time, I don’t know what is.
I use this quality deliberately, but extend it further by inserting it into a transferred photograph. The projection, cyanotype, or printed image becomes a portal that lets me step into a past I never lived in. This is how my bodily presence intrudes into the photograph.
The first time I painted over a printed photograph, the reaction was shockingly intense, far more intense than when I paint the model or something from my head. I believe I understand why: my particular upbringing and further life in Russia left me with a complicated relationship with the past itself and developed my particular rage at the ways history is manipulated by power, often resulting in wars and other manipulations, as well as frustration at how ordinary lives fade away.
Each brushstroke becomes a small act of vandalism against official forgetting, a rebellion against linearity, and at the same time a strange form of care for the people who have slipped into obscurity in an effort to get them back.
In your paintings, the image coexists with an area of photographic abstraction. To what extent do you feel free to “lie” to the photograph while remaining faithful to the emotional truth it contains?
I’d argue that painterly abstraction coexists with the photographic image, not the other way around. But honestly, I’m not particularly worried about ‘lying’ to the photograph because I’m not trying to capture its ‘emotional truth’. I don’t know it; I wasn’t there. The photograph isn’t a sacred text; it works only as a trigger for a particular response from a particular body with a particular experience. I simply follow my hand and impulses wherever they lead. Sometimes a face gets lost in a blur of gesture while a shoe stays sharp. Sometimes entire sections dissolve into colour while other parts remain recognizable.
But it is important how honest I am in the moment of painting, that I’m not trying to impress anyone, show anything or follow trends. What I want to leave on the canvas is my rage, my confusion, my rebellion, my doubts, my sadness, all distilled in each brushstroke. How do I really exist in front of this photograph? What does it do to me? My task is to deal with myself and pursue my own truth and authenticity. What viewers make of that, whether it matches their reading, is none of my business. I’m not their Soviet grandma who knows better how they should feel. I believe communication between artwork and viewer is their own intimate process, and the artist should get away and give the work freedom to speak for itself.
Your work intertwines personal memory and collective history. Do you feel more like an author, custodian, or translator of the images you manipulate?
Author, custodian, or translator all feel like serious adult professional roles, and my painting is, on the contrary, a rather playful and energetic activity. I’d rather compare myself to a dog who likes to bark and jump around but is too well-trained to do it without the right trigger. My inner dog was deeply affected by fake history and an unapproachable past, so bringing her an enormous, enlarged photograph pulls the trigger and allows her to forget manners and do her best and most musical barks.
I keep my collection of photographs carefully, as little treasures from moments of someone’s precious life. But in my art practice, I use them solely as a tool to enter the painting situation. Painting is a completely absurd activity if you think about it: the world is burning, and you are here, smearing coloured slime on stretched fabric, right? Yet when you fully immerse yourself in the process, you can discover the most magical things: the tipsy feeling of freedom and touch of infinity, full dissolution of self and unrestrained self-expression.
Each time I’m there, I’m impressed. From the perspective of an everyday rational mind, it’s hard to believe that by doing this silly thing you can communicate all your life experience and all your gathered bits of wisdom, your mistakes and uncertainties, your weaknesses and powers, your temporality and timelessness. And the photograph triggers this response, getting me into these occasionally magical states of painting.
I often compare painting to sex, especially from the female side. In sex, you’re doing these petty, ridiculous movements, yet they can carry you into entirely otherworldly states of mind. You may desperately want those states, but you can’t just decide to have them; you need to get sufficiently excited first. People employ foreplay, rituals, kinks, whatever creates the right conditions. Same with painting. For reasons stated above, I am aroused by the inapproachability of the past, so I physically place myself in front of an enlarged old photograph and let it affect me. That’s how I arrive at painting. I can’t just walk into the studio and start. I must create a scene where painting can happen.
But real sex—like real painting— is never just excitement and orgasms. There are insecurities, doubts, awkwardness, and miscommunications. Most of my painting time is also spent on those. But it’s okay, I don’t want to pretend to be some serious, disciplined professional who always knows what she’s doing. Most of the time, I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone truly does.
So if I have to choose the right metaphor for my role in my practice, between being a custodian with a magnifying glass in a dusty archive or someone trying to have sex, I’m definitely the second. Or maybe I’m the barking dog…in fishnets.
What is your relationship with your childhood photographs today, after so many years spent transforming them through painting?
I never used my own childhood photographs; I only use those from before my birth. Generally, I never work with any photographs featuring me. There is more than enough of my presence in my paintings already. Bringing myself into a time when I did not exist lets me touch the ontological questions of existence and non‑existence, or, if injecting some drama, look in the eye of death.
Death is happening in every detail of the photograph, as described in Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. Those people existed then, and I did not. Can one even think of what it is to not exist? Now I am present, and they are gone. I’m curious about the intersection of those two conditions.
Nevertheless, there are some photographs I return to again and again, perhaps because I find them beautiful or intriguing, or due to my emotional ties with the people depicted. Each time I paint them, my relationship with the image deepens. The people in it, whether I knew them in life or not, become more present in my world, almost as if I were having a conversation with them.
This is especially true when working with my family archive. Working over these images allows me to revisit relationships with those I miss. For instance, my grandmother is no longer in the world, but painting over her transferred photographs lets me engage with her, step into moments of her past I could never witness directly, and occasionally argue with her too, in my head. It helps me process grief, honour her memory, appreciate her presence in my life, and maybe outsmart death just a little.
We had some serious conflicts. She certainly didn’t suffer from a shortage of strong opinions. Immersing myself in her past in this way has helped me move from judgment to understanding. In this way, my work sometimes has a strong self-therapeutic dimension, alongside curiosity, rebellion, and moments of playful provocation.
For your participation in the exhibition “Small is Beautiful”, small-format works take on a central role. How does your approach change when you reduce the scale?
When I received the invitation, I thought: what a fantastic chance to reach such a wide audience as at Flowers Gallery, but what can I show? I had never done anything this small in my life! Translating the gestural energy of my two-metre works into canvases no larger than 20–22 cm is quite a challenge. So I got 14 tiny canvases, 13 to 18 cm, and decided to paint them quickly, then choose the strongest pieces.
Large works can take months of despair, endless adjustments, and questioning if the painting is faithful to my sense of truth, but small ones leave no room for that. They either work or they don’t, and you are either delighted or frustrated, nothing in between. The compressed intensity felt like a brief, exhilarating holiday affair: fast, intense, and entirely absorbing. Also, I got more experimental with colours. For big works, I premix my paint in bulk, but here I mixed directly on the palette, more traditionally, which brought me to a greater variety of colours and new discoveries.
The fact that the scale was very close to standard photographic size made my engagement with the photographic world more intimate. I had to make my gestures and presence compatible with the miniature humans from the tiny photograph. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, having to shrink myself to minuscule proportions to fit through a tiny doorway.
I used photographs of my grandparents from the family archive, and the small scale seemed to invite even more tenderness and care, making each gesture feel weightier, more deliberate, more alive.
I would still say I prefer stepping into the portal of a large-scale canvas, where my gestures can roam freely, and the people in the image are more or less my own scale. Yet compressing myself to match these miniature canvases was a curious experience, one that demanded both physical and emotional recalibration.
We live in an era in which the photographic image is infinite and replicable, while your pictorial gesture is unique. Do you see this as an act of resistance to the dispersion of memory?
I think I see it more as a resistance to the existential condition of being human. Yes, photography is infinitely replicable now, and earlier it was rarer and more valued, but even then, history was never objective, death was never optional, and time flowed indifferently to our aspirations and desires. I am curious about more eternal issues than the question of photographic reproducibility, or even photography itself.
I don’t think the contemporary situation with memory, kept in photographs, is necessarily worse than before, at least if you can ignore the endless parade of cats and babies. With the developments in archaeology, data analysis, and history, there is far more information about the past, and it’s more accessible; plus ordinary, non-famous people can now share their experiences to potentially unlimited audiences. But there are also far more ways to distort that information, such as Photoshop, AI, deepfakes and the internet’s favourite pastime, conspiracy theories. I think, overall, the balance of truth and lies in history hasn’t really changed.
So I’d rather worry about something a bit more timeless—I’d hate to fall out of fashion if something happens to the infinite replicability of the photograph!
Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website