Artists

Katja Novitskova

Press release

"Mirror life is a hypothetical form of life with mirror-reflected molecular structures. If it can exist or be synthesised it would be very similar to our life, but exist in a parallel space of interactions with possibly catastrophic overlaps with our own current life forms. Mirror animals would need to feed on reflected food, produced by reflected plants. How would this mirror life look like, and how would it look at us? Perhaps a set of artificially synthesised primitive life forms emerges branching into a novel path for life. A common ancestral community of primitive cells that develops into a living thing, a genetically modified feral organism. The eyes and the eggs..."
-Katja Novitskova

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. Novitskova’s work tackles the complexity and eventual failures of depicting the world through technologically driven narratives. By uniting art and science to the level of nature, Novitskova brings awareness to the mediation and representation tools used to depict these realms. More specifically, she focuses on the mapping of biological territories that are no longer outside but rather ‘inside’ biological bodies. The images that depict nature become models for future approximations of life and translations into more synthetic forms. The cycle of biological morphogenesis and visual creation becomes a loop.

Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions including Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2024); 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2024); Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2023, solo); Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (2023, solo); Stavanger Art Museum (2023); Marta Herford Museum, Herford (2022); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2022, solo); MUDAM Luxembourg (2021); Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (2021, solo); Belgrade Biennale (2021); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2020) amongst others.