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Manifesta 15
Type
Katja Novitskova’s works include sculptures generated from existing online imagery and text, installations, video and artist publications. In her work, she attempts to capture the human expansion that is not just geographical (as applied to peoples, territories and mineral resources), but rather biological: genomes, bio-molecular structures, neural firings, embryogenesis and other inner workings of human and nonhuman life. The frontier logic comes with the requirement for extensive mapping, which – in an era of big-data analysis, genetic engineering and AI – means a colossal amount of digital pattern processing, a lot of it in the form of images. Novitskova often uses this visual information taken from mainly scientific sources (images of the lab worm species C. Elegans, datasets of automatic wildlife photographs) as a material in her work. Creating arrays of translation between various media, she is interested in the form-generating potential of art and its capacity to extrapolate current trends and realities.
Presenting adaptations of existing works specifically for Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana.
Pattern of Activation (C. elegans)
Katja Novitskova’s key themes delve into internet art practices, new technologies and ecologies of the Anthropocene era. By dealing with the complexity and the potential defectiveness within the representation of the world through technological narratives, she draws attention to the mediation tools. Novitskova creates alternative geographies of biological organisms that emerge from data sets using various devices of vision like microscopes, cameras and visual algorithms. Images researched online are often transformed into sculpture by digitally printing the material onto aluminium display stands. The site-specific installation “'Pattern of Activation (C. elegans)” is based on the work series “Approximation” (2012 – ongoing) and 'Pattern of Activation (embryogenesis)” (2017). It examines one of the most commonly used model organism species, the C. Elegans round worm, through its mediated and mutated representations in bio-medical experimental research. C. Elegans is the first animal to have its genome fully sequenced and the first animal to get an AI digital simulation of itself. It is used by Novitskova to question the exploitation of animals for biomedical purposes, as well as the future of genetic modification. Scaled up to the size of giant snake-like forms, these worm shapes wriggle weightlessly into the air with cables are slipping out of their eggs creating immersive, post human landscapes that have overcome the biotic apocalypse. As if bio-technological mutants and artificial intelligence have replaced all wild life. This eerie landscape reflects the potential ecological effects of increasing human tinkering with life forms on the level of genomes and body structures, which can be seen as a new form of colonial expansion.
