Katja Novitskova at Manifesta 15, Barcelona
Katja Novitskova is presenting adaptations of existing works specifically for Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana.
On view until November 24
Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana unveils its forthcoming programme, revealing participants hailing from diverse disciplines and corners of the globe. The Manifesta 15 venues host an array of participants, 55% of which have either created newly-commissioned work or adapted projects especially for the biennial. In addition, in a sign of Manifesta 15’s commitment to promoting local perspectives, 36% of the participants are local.
Katja Novitskova (b. 1984 Tallinn, Estonia) lives and works in Amsterdam. She was artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 2013 to 2014.
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.