Olga Grotova is an artist and poet living and working in London. Her practice is concerned with collecting and mapping stories of women from post-Soviet states that have been erased from established historical narratives. Grotova undertakes extensive research to discover lost histories of communities and families from former Soviet states in order to dispel male dominated and hegemonic ‘official’ narratives characterised by extraction, patriarchy and imperialism.

Grotova works with cameraless photography, creating photograms that produce shadow-like traces of her and her mother’s bodies, which are then fragmented in densely layered compositions. Their forms intersect with those of dried flowers and railway maps, as well as stone pigments and soil, all derived from locations directly connected to the histories she evokes. Grotova sees these substances and materials as participants in the building of new narratives, as they bring their own stories with them. Soil is especially fascinating to Groteva in the way that it functions as a living archive, one that records everything–life, death, birth, destruction, failure–without editing or erasure, unlike the official histories of nations and governments, which constantly rewrite themselves depending on who holds power. 

Through this process of fragmentation, reassembly and abstraction, Grotova removes hierarchical distinctions between the subject and object to consider how the natural world bears witness to human experience. The body, too, becomes a site for the memorialisation of and reckoning with historical absence and erasure. The photograms present a shadow or a trace of a body which was once in a physical encounter with the light-sensitive paper, but has now gone. This experimental technique, developed intuitively through trial and error, introduces a tactile and sensual quality to the works. In the pieces Grotova produces with her mother, their bodies interact and overlap, but never fully fit together. ‘That gap’, says Grotova, ‘between mother and daughter, between history and memory, between silence and presence—is where the work lives.’