In her first major solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Katja Novitskova (*1984 in Tallinn, Estonia; lives and works in Amsterdam) ventures into the frontier areas of visibility.

In the present age, almost all aspects of our surroundings and our lives are recorded every second. The obsession with collecting data has long gone beyond the limits of our planet. High-sensitive cameras, drones and space vehicles, electron microscopes, telescopes and infrared recordings provide image data beyond the visible spectrum of humans. Yet we still need our eyes to evaluate the collected flood of data, because image analysis programs operate much less reliably. It is precisely in this tensional field of translation that Novitskova intervenes with her works, conveying the phenomenon to the gallery space. Her sculptures and installations stand in the space as visual echoes of their own origin and employ superimpositions and recontextualizations to create a poetic narration on the end of invisibility in the age of surveillance.

With the kind support of the Culture Department of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, and the Mondriaan Fonds.

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We flew close to the ground at night, the sensors reading for heat. Even as we studied the thermographic maps, we knew that the heat points of our own bodies could be tracked on a vast map above us. Our energy, possibly useful for an arcane production system. Another living intelligence might see us not as discrete beings, but as a slow, crawling mass of energies, as series of surfaces with rare oils and proteins, as merely curious material.

Or, in a slightly more comforting theory (one sourced from the long-running, regrettably-named forum Xenomythos), we would be the aliens, the threatening figures in their own mythologies. We would be the sources of new, fake-seeming languages to use in instructive cartoons, mirroring those we had shown our children: lithe and bubbly alien spawn learning about expression from Surrealist paintings.

I remember how the baby aliens slapped down wick and gobs of paint across a canvas. They painted our sun, our stars, our sky, and our cathedrals and great men, like these things would hold the same fascination for another race. They held up their paintings, explained to viewers how to discern symbols and interpret art. Art, as source for more encrypted keys, as generative of activated hieroglyphics.

They rightly had the option of rejecting us, for chemical incompatibility. For the first time in many millennia, our place in the universe was just tentative. We could cause imbalance which their ecology could not absorb. So at every turn, we had to prove our usefulness through our pattern processing. We had to hone and refine our interpretive ability, our scanning speed, our surrealism.

This was the only governing rule — to be irreplaceable. Instead of fear, we felt chance opening up in front of us like a gridded plane, possibility stretching out. I imagined a coin set in motion, spinning through space; one face of it, good fortune, the other, devastation. Somewhere between our understanding and the truth, the ideal and the mutation, was the space we stepped in.

Nora K. Khan

This essay is from Dawn Mission, artist book and catalogue to be published with Mousse Publishing in 2016.