Katja Novitskova
If Only You Could See What I've Seen With Your Eyes. Stage 2.
February 23 – June 10, 2018
Kumu Art Museum
Tallinn, Estonia
The exhibition takes the visitor into the world of living machines, patterns imprisoned in synthetic materials, and two-dimensional sculptures of genetically modified life forms, with the daring typical to the dystopian realm.
Katja Novitskova’s oeuvre is located at the crossroads of visual culture, digital technologies and speculative fiction: she is interested in how the rapidly developing planet is increasingly more dependent on various data flows, which intermediate, preserve and alter the environment that surrounds us in visual form. The display is an immersive environment interpreting and looking back at the current day from the future, where the world as we know it is no longer recognisable.
“If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes,” says the replicant Roy Batty to the maker of his eyes in the sci-fi film Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott. Katja Novitskova and the curator Kati Ilves borrowed the quote for the title of the exhibition in the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017, referring to the complexity of seeing in the contemporary data maze. For the show in Kumu, the artist and the curator have progressed from the project that the Centre for Contemporary Arts Estonia produced for the Estonian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale by including a number of works that have not been presented before, plus some pieces created specifically for this exhibition.
For more information: https://kunstimuuseum.ekm.ee/en/syndmus/katja-novitskova/
[Image: Installation view, Katja Novitskova, If Only You Could See What I've Seen With Your Eyes. Stage 2., Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, 2018. Photo: Tõnu Tunnel / Katja Novitskova.]