Olga Grotova (b. 1986 in Chelyabinsk, Russia) is an artist and poet living and working in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art MA in Painting (2016). Her practice involves collecting and mapping stories of Soviet and Eastern-European women that have been erased from established historical narratives.
Grotova undertakes research journeys to discover the lost histories of communities and families from former Soviet states in order to dispel male-dominated and power-centric ‘official’ narratives. Her practice is a feminist interruption of the Russian political narrative plagued by extraction, patriarchy, and imperialism. The erased female narratives create fractures and inconsistencies in the official history and undermine the regime built on terror, misogyny and militarisation.
By discovering erased or misunderstood female histories and questioning the homogenised state-backed narrative, she opens up the potential for larger explorations of resistance to global ecological catastrophe, colonisation and totalitarianism.
