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Features – Katinka Goldberg

Katinka Goldberg, born in Sweden in 1981, lives and works in Oslo. She holds a BA in Photography from the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. Her artistic practice explores the relationships between memory, identity, and personal narrative. Rooted in an intimate approach, her work draws on archives, fragmented stories, and a particular sensitivity to images as carriers of history and emotion. Through this, she creates a body of work in which the image becomes a space for reconstruction and projection.

The series Shtumer Alef (literally “silent letter” in Yiddish) is grounded in an exploration of family memory and the absences that shape it. Through delicate and fragmentary images, Goldberg evokes what cannot be spoken, giving form to a story marked by silence, transmission, and loss. For this project, she retraced the journey of her Jewish grandmother, who fled the Nazis during the Second World War from Trondheim to Sweden. Plants collected along the railway replace the face in a studio portrait of her grandmother, suggesting both presence and erasure.

In Bristningar (“fractures” in Swedish), the artist continues this investigation by focusing on the ruptures and fragilities that shape personal narratives. The images, imbued with both softness and tension, convey states of transformation in which the visible and invisible intertwine. The notion of fracture becomes a transitional space where identity is reconfigured. Works such as Memories of Escape evoke connections between generations of women and the impact of memory, between presence and disappearance, on subsequent generations. In Grandmother with Lion, Goldberg introduces a more playful dimension, addressing childhood trauma through collage. The work portrays her paternal grandmother as both familiar and unstable, creating a sense of emotional distance. The installation, combining wallpaper and photography, reinforces this autobiographical narrative, where sequences, rhythms, and image associations enable an intimate and gradual reading.