Breathless

KATYA GROKHOVSKY

The search for my own narrative and “home” through the female migrant body is a persistent idea in my multidisciplinary practice. Profound sense of displacement pervades my creative thought process and I often utilize my own body as a point of departure and frequently as the only instrument at my disposal. Acting as a transcendental device, the body is a tool in various mediums, such as performance and video, photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting and writing.

I relentlessly investigate the violent act of separation from one culture and frustrating necessary attempt to belong to another. Often mesmerized by the future promise of yet another place to conquer, I become conscious of the duality of the mind and body in the process. Whilst the mind clearly follows instructions to build a better stable secure life, the body wildly suppresses the sensory memory of a place once native. The liminal space between being there and being here becomes full of tense emptiness and possibilities.

Within this space, themes of endurance, time, identity and gender constructions are explored through mining my own experience of life as a woman in the East and West under different political regimes. Past ideals, current cultural stereotypes and desires, as well as ideological and political pressures make up a fertile ground for research and experimentation. The terrain of the existence of the Immigrant is analyzed, critiqued and observed via interdisciplinary combinations of media, making up a complex landscape of environments. Post-performance, post-eventual residue and ephemera is often exhibited and in itself re-constructed and created as evidential presence of the event, fictional or factual, once staged.