Katja Novitskova: If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes. Stage 2

As of Friday, February 23, the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn opens Katja Novitskova’s first solo show in Estonia, If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes. Stage 2, curated by Kati Ilves.

If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes. Stage 2 works from the intersection of big data-driven industries and the expanding domain of seeing in the thick of ecological crisis. The display is an immersive environment inhabited by living machines, graphic charts embedded in synthetic materials, and two-dimensional sculptures of wild and genetically modified life forms.

Today, almost all aspects of human and non-human lives are being registered on an environmental scale. The collection and processing of data has become a tool used to map all possible surfaces on Earth and beyond. Seeing has become an expanding extractive industry. Emerging from these new visual forms, the exhibition explores the radical new articulation of the role of the image, and how constant planetary scale mediation gains an ecological dimension.

“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, produced by the Centre for Contemporary Arts Estonia. For the show in Kumu, the artist and the curator have progressed from the initial project by including a number of works that have not been presented before, plus some pieces created specifically for this exhibition.

Katja Novitskova (b. 1984) is an artist originally from Tallinn, but lives and works mostly in Berlin and Amsterdam. Her oeuvre is located at the crossroads of visual culture, digital technologies and speculative fiction: she is interested in how the rapidly transforming planet is increasingly more dependent on various data flows which mediate, preserve and alter the environment that surrounds us in visual form. Novitskova has earned a lot of international acclaim: she has had solo exhibitions in New York (2016) and Shanghai (2017), and her works have been included in group exhibitions at the MoMA in New York (2015) and at the Lyon and Berlin Biennials (2015 and 2016).

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue in Estonian and English, which will be presented at Kumu on April 5.

On May 30 at 6pm, a video performance of Katja Novitskova’s work by Piibe Kolka will take place in the Kumu auditorium as part of the Kumu Documentary series.

Curator: Kati Ilves
Graphic designer: Ott Metusala

Partners and supporters: Centre for Contemporary Arts Estonia, Estonian Ministry of Culture, TTÜ Mektory and Kaubamaja AS

We thank: Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Greene Naftali Gallery, Veronica Lugaro, Kareem Lotfy, Larissa Novitskova, Vladimir Novitskov, Tõnu Narro, Mihkel Lember and Advokaadibüroo COBALT