“The person who did this exhibition last year, is not me,” says Katja Novitskova about her personal and professional response to this moment of collective crisis affecting many of us. “What I do kind of defines me, and as soon as I’m in this context of ‘computer, cooking, nothing else’, I’m losing my own sense of identity.” Speaking to AQNB editor Steph Kretowicz for the first of an ongoing series of bi-monthly podcasts called Artist Statement, this conversation with the Russian-Estonian artist launches our month-long Patreon subscription drive today, July 1.
Novitskova has been on AQNB’s radar since her early days as a still emerging artist, when the site was establishing its own identity a few years after Novitskova published her scene-defining Post Internet Survival Guide 2010. Her work has long since moved on from that era’s obsessions with the image and its circulation—exemplified by her long-running ‘“Approximations’” series of aluminium cutouts of stock animal photography—to a more recent run of exhibitions at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn in 2018 and Whitechapel Gallery in 2019. Concluding with her Invasion Curves installation for Preis der Nationalgalerie at Berlin’s Hamburger Banhof that same year, her practice these days delves into the urgent concerns around the Anthropocene.
Speaking from her current base under COVID-19 lockdown in Amsterdam, Novitskova talks about her attempts toward establishing an “ecological totality” in this more recent work around microorganisms and the effects of human industrial expansion on the environment, while reexamining her role and direction as an artist in a world in crisis. This conversation is the first in a series featuring artists and thinkers working between visual art, music and critical thinking, with more to come from Colin Self and Lawrence Lek, among others. The Artist Statement podcast will be available exclusively to our subscribers, with Novitskova’s being one of two unlocked free episodes to launch this month.
As part of a subscription drive aimed at keeping AQNB (currently volunteer-run and maintained by its dedicated in-house team) alive, the site will be rolling out a number of new incentives to join our Patreon community. That’s including a regular music and digital art compendium series—building on the success of our even my dreams don’t go outside—and exclusive artist edition merchandise to be announced in the coming weeks.
AQNB is a trusted editorial platform for artists resisting categorisation and responding to changes brought on by technology and communication, and we’ve built a strong community around us over the years. Our Patreon will be crucial to the site’s survival moving forward. With this new programme of content, we’re gearing toward engaging and working with you—our readers and subscribers—in building a stronger foundation for our scene into the future.
Subscribe to our Patreon to join in the conversation: patreon.com/aqnb**
