If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes addresses the relationship between the domain of seeing, big data-driven industries, and ecology in times of biotic crisis.
Currently, vast aspects of human and nonhuman lives are being registered and modeled on an environmental scale. Collection and processing of data has become a tool used to map all possible surfaces, moments and spectra on Earth and beyond – from faces to biological cell walls to dust on Mars.
This is performed by human, and increasingly, robotic agents, and is directed at people, both wild and captured creatures, and nonliving processes. Seeing has become an expanding extractive industry. In the process new visual languages, commodities and life forms are being generated reflecting back to us our often violent entanglement with the world: patterns of embryonic development in mutated lab-test worms, live-streamed flows of CO2 gas across the planet, or a group of near-extinct animals passing by a tree and noticing the tracking camera.
Katja Novitskova works from new forms of imagery taken from the realm of present day visual representation. This exhibition explores this radical new articulation of the role of the image, and how constant planetary scale mediation gains an ecological dimension.
The exhibition’s title is a quote taken from a conversation in Ridley Scott’s cult sci-fi film, Blade Runner (1982), between the replicant Roy Batty and designer Hannibal Chew — who created his eyes.
Artist Katja Novitskova
Curator Kati Ilves
Commissioner Maria Arusoo (Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia)
Assistants to the artist Isabel da Costa, Leon Eisermann, Kristina Õllek
Installation Tõnu Narro, Mihkel Lember
Project manager in Venice Tomas Ewald
Graphic design and website Ott Metusala
Project assistant Kaarin Kivirähk
Commissioned by Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia
Financed by Estonian Ministry of Culture
Supported by Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Greene Naftali, Cobalt Law Firm, DSV Global Transport and Logistics, Estonian Embassy in Berlin
Special Thanks Mariska Bijl, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Annina Herzer, Kadri Jauram, Darja Jefimova, Maarja Jullinen, Kaisa Kaer, Ester Kangur, Ott Karulin, Kadi Kesküla, Aap Kirsel, Piibe Kolka, Merit Kopli, Karin Laansoo, Einike Leppik, Kareem Lotfy, Saskia Epp Lõhmus, Daniele Monticelli, Carol Piibur, Rebeka Põldsam, Lill Volmer, Kadi-Maarja Võsu, Aneth Rosen, Liisa Rõžikova, Risto Rõõmus, Mari-Liis Vanem, Evelina Vedom, Tauri Västrik, Erasmus+ programme, Estonian Embassy in Rome, My City Hotel, Outset
Further thanks are extended to the selection committee Rael Artel, Maria Arusoo, Sebastian Cichocki, Ekow Eshun, Sirje Helme, Martha Kirszenbaum, Kaido Ole, Ingrid Ruudi, Maria-Kristiina Soomre
La Biennale di Venezia is the oldest and largest international art forum. Participating since 1997, this is the eleventh time Estonia is exhibiting. Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, is the official representative of the Estonian exposition at la Biennale di Venezia.