Katya Grokhovsky works across installation, sculpture, video, fiber, painting, drawing and performance to examine themes of migration, displacement, identity, body, and gender. An immigrant from Ukraine, her practice is deeply informed by autobiographical experience, engaging with failure, loss of communication, and longing, while reclaiming the body and agency through play, humor, and experimentation.
Weaving the personal and political, she creates worlds and personas that confront stereotypes, prejudices, and oppression, often emphasizing the absurd in the everyday. Her work reflects her own journey while resonating with the shared histories and collective memories of displaced communities. The acts of leaving home, navigating new cultural landscapes, learning a new language and reconstructing identity form the foundation of her investigations.
Occupying the terrain of the critical Capitalist grotesque and a 21st-century anarchic Dadaist Garage-Band Feminist Punk sensibility, Grokhovsky’s process is driven by extensive research and collecting. Each project begins with a careful selection of materials for their symbolic potential: fabric, found and discarded objects, archives, paint, and digital media, emphasizing tactility and physical presence in relation to the senses, memory and communal consumerist detritus.
Her vision bridges personal and generational narratives, fostering empathy and dialogue while highlighting the fluidity of identity and the resilience of humanity in the face of change. She examines the formation and deconstruction of communal pain, creating platforms for practitioners, partners, and publics to contribute: centering silenced or excluded voices during times of conflict. Grokhovsky seeks to counter historical amnesia, illuminate pressing issues, and interrogate power dynamics and notions of freedom, working as an immigrant, woman, and artist-citizen.