Katja Novitskova’s latest exhibition, titled GREEN GROWTH, is running at Birsfelden, Switzerland’s SALTS exhibition space from June 19 to July 21.
The Estonian-born artist’s style of putting to physical form the digital aesthetics of the internet has been evolving through the years, from her amazing 2014 exhibition at Berlin’s Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler gallery to her part in the 2012 group show at Italy’s Foundazione Brodbeck. In 2013, AQNB caught up with her in an interview that shows the scenes behind her process, so-to-speak.
Don’t You Know Who I Am? – Art After Identity Politics, a major group exhibition opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), will be running from June 7 to November 23.
The exhibition explores themes of identity and identification, investigating how various societal groups have defined themselves along racial, ethnic, or gendered lines in order to increase their visibility and overcome discrimination.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary Gallery Weekend Berlin is running across the city May 2 to 4.
There’ll be 50+ galleries officially and unofficially taking part in the weekend-long affair where the city’s exciting art scene opens its doors to the public in unison.
There’s also Galerie Neu, KOWworth checking in on, as well as extended opening hours at Sandy Brown and The Cable Guys group exhibition at Future Gallery opened May 1.
The second of a three-part series of exhibitions at Berlin’s KLEMM’s galerie, conceived in collaboration with Alexej Meschtschanow and Ulrich Gebert, ‘Just came to say HELLO’, running January 17 to March 2, is a provoking insight into the myth of the person in the singular.
Answering the question of where the herd ends and the individual begins has its hazards and curator Meschtschanow opts to complicate the drive to a resolution only more.
See some install photos from the exhibition in our media section to the top right of this page and check the KLEMM’S Gallery website for details of the exhibition. **
But then the title is also just a “jumbled sequence of numbers” around which speculative realist Armen Avanessian and the gallery curate a show featuring Julieta Aranda, Ian Cheng, Diann Bauer, Daniel Keller, Katja Novitskova, Hito Steyerl, Andreas Töpfer. Parallel to that will be the symposium where the #Akzeleration book on, well, Accelerationism, featuring contributions by Nick Land and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, as well as Avanessian and Matteo Pasquinelli who also program the day of talks. Discussion titles like ‘Epistemic Panic and the Problem of Life’ and ‘Days of Phuture Past: Accelerationism in the Present Moment’ will be covered by the likes of Josephine Berry Slater and Benjamin Noys, while concluding with ‘System Is Not the Enemy; You Are’.
Meanwhile, here’s a bit of the 14.12.13 blurb:
“14.12.13 is the name of an exhibition. 141213 is a jumbled sequence of numbers. 14,12,13 is a chronological disorder. 14/12/13 indicates a fundamental multidimensionality of time: every present will be past and was futural. Today doesn’t add up, even if contemporary art tries to make sense of it. Fourteentwelvethirteen will be up for only one day and doesn’t make sweeping statements or give a panoramic view. How does one oppose an exhausted aesthetic paradigm of art, in which artworks beg for ever new critical judgments, so that (art) history makes its weary progress? For quite some time, all attempts to overcome the modernist logic of progress has been misunderstood as postmodernism. Instead of the museum’s notion of historical linearity, other forms of assembly emerge. 14.12.13”
A new show at the Friedericianum: Speculations on Anonymous Materials, claims to bring together for the first time, “approaches in international art that reinterpret the Anonymous Materials created by rapid and incisive technological change.” Most of the artists involved work somewhere in the proximity of post-internet art but the exhibition asserts a different connective thread: a shared attitude towards materiality. James Elkins has written about a fear of materialityin art criticism, noting how the physical and material aspects of a work are often explored only so far, while art historical and theoretical accounts dominate. And yet many artists are far less interested in the theoretical paradigms of an hermetically sealed art world than in evaluating the images, objects, media and materials that surround them.
The Speculations on Anonymous Materials exhibition partly appropriates its title from Reza Negarestani’s book Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. A work of speculative realism based in the Middle East, the text disrupts any hint of subjective narrative with historical accounts, references and theory. Negarestani’s own anonymous materials take on a life of their own within the text. By focusing on the material aspect, the Speculations exhibition asks us to consider how these artists treat the digital world they interrogate as a world of materials, an interest that exists independent of art historical or conceptual concerns. Here’s a provide of four artists featured, with a view to understanding how materials and materiality are primary concerns among them.
Pamela Rosenkranz, ‘Bow Human’ (2012).
Pamela Rosenkranz’s work bears a direct relationship with Negarestani’s theories -she commissioned him to write a text for her 2009 exhibition in Venice, and shares his interest in Speculative Realism. This young philosophical movement, which grew largely through online dissemination, is based on a rejection of philosophies that privilege the human experience of existence. In much of Rosenkranz’s work, the human body is a felt absence, an entity described by and through objects. In her series, Firm Being (2009), Rosenkranz replaced the clear water in commercial plastic water bottles with skin-toned silicone. An attached Fiji logo continues to sell us its idea of an untouched island paradise while the contents offer only a repellent plastic version of ourselves. In The most important Body of Water is Yours (2010), a stretched spandex surface has been covered in messy gold paint, suggestive of a human imprint. Rosenkranz takes our anthropocentrism to a laughable extreme – we can’t drink our own desires, and we don’t sweat gold. This sentiment reaches a pinnacle in her series Bow Human (2009), where sculptures made from silver emergency blankets hint at human figures cowering underneath. The series warns of dire consequences arising from our human-centered worldview, the same view that makes us assume we really are under the protection of the blanket. Rosenkranz creates a world of independent objects and materials that comment upon our human follies and, she warns, will likely outlive us.
Katja Novitskova, Post Internet Survival Guide (2010).
Apocalyptic overtones are also present in the seminal Post Internet Survival Guide (2010), a project and book initiated by Katja Novitskova. The work does not envision the end of the Internet but merely our daily need to cope with it as a given condition. The foreword states; “The notion of a survival guide arises as an answer to a basic human need to cope with increasing complexity. In the face of death, personal attachment and confusion, one has to feel, interpret and index this ocean of signs in order to survive.” But as a random assortment of imagery and text, largely sourced online, the book is less a guide for navigating complexity than a manifestation of it. Surfing the web has become a fairly benign and mundane activity. Most Internet users exploit familiar social media sites as anchorage points for online navigation, never straying far into strange terrain. Works like the Post Internet Survival Guide (2010) re-insert the kind of overwhelming complexity that users seek to avoid, once again rendering the web as a maze of anonymous, unfamiliar materials. The Survival Guide treats online media as a series of independent materials, detached from their origins, functions or meanings.
The films of Ryan Trecartin involve casts of fast-talking characters, often in wigs and face-paint, who shift between different accents in grating high-pitched tones, speaking a kind of pop-culture inspired stream-of-consciousness. Layered upon these loose character narratives is a flow of hyper-coloured computer graphics and post-production effects. Trecartin never allows viewers much time to begin decoding his onslaught of signifiers, combining familiar tropes so frenetically that they blur into a singular hyperactive experience. Text for the Speculations exhibition states that; “The order of the day is to understand the world from the vantage point of abstraction and not to abstract from the world.” This sentiment finds cogency in Trecartin’s work, where his source material, the frenzied world of uploaded videos, is already abstract. As with the Post Internet Survival Guide (2010), his films are not a tool for navigating or understanding the materials they exploit, but a new way of manifesting their frenetic, disjointed and confused existence.
Ed Atkins video work translates the conventions of high-definition film making into unique poetic compositions. Atkins is particularly interested in the slippage between the material and immaterial aspects of the moving image. As digital technology has enabled us to create hyper-real imagery, the physical remnants of film-making have disappeared. Materialist film-makers of the 1960s drew attention to the material nature of film itself, often working directly with film-strips. Despite the lack of a physical substance to manipulate, Atkins evinces similar structural concerns in his work, often imitating traditional camera effects using digital animation. These effects, commonplace in mainstream film-making, are elevated to primary content. An immaterial-material binary pervades all elements of Atkin’s film-making. In Us Dead Talk Love (2012) a floating 3D head speaks a voice-over by Atkins where he recalls finding an eyelash under his foreskin. The visceral and tactile imagery evoked by the dialogue is undercut by the eerie presence of the hyper-realistic yet incorporeal figure. Atkins simultaneously reveals the artifice present in the digital image while re-inserting a sense of the material into his films.
The material aspects of an artwork are often too readily equated with a clear theoretical or art historical meaning. This is especially true of the way we discuss artists working with, or inspired by, digital technology; viewing their interactions as predominantly conceptual, an inevitable consequence of dealing with immaterial media. But for many artists, their interactions with materials are about re-working or re-positioning those materials, not about finitely decoding them. We shouldn’t expect artists to act as our guides into the vast realm of anonymous materials, but to provide pause for visual reflection and speculation. These artists do not adopt the mantle of artist-geniuses carefully manipulating materials to create original artworks, but adopt positions that limit, without erasing, subjective intent, allowing the materials they use to rise to the fore as contingent, independent and anonymous objects.
The monthly club night Urban Mutations, run by DJs MFK & WEN, offers – according to their description – “engaging, multi-stylistic club music”, which can be heard live at the Paloma Bar and other venues in Berlin (on bills with the likes of DJ Rashad, Zebra Katz, Death Grips or Bok Bok), as well as online, via Berlin Community Radio. The idea of Urban Mutations evolved from nights the DJs used to host at Neukölln’s O-Tannenbaum and Times, and was designed as a bass music counterbalance to the predominantly techno-oriented club scene that Berlin has traditionally been associated with. That said, the DJs declare that they don’t actually mind techno (their sets occasionally wandering into its territories) but from their perspective the scene felt too monochromatic, hence the birth of Urban Mutations, which embodies the notion of enriching Berlin nightlife with the plurality of bass music’s transfigurations.
The sonic experience is interesting enough – perfectly tailored to the needs of the dance floor (the imaginary dance floor in one’s own head counts here too), a varied, relentlessly pulsating collation of the numerous metamorphoses that contemporary bass offers, from juke and post-house to avant-tinged, future-RnB. And yet, what take Urban Mutations from comprehensive to outstanding are its links to the visual/multimedia movement commonly referred to as ‘post-Internet’. This nebulous interdisciplinary category is a product of (and commentary on) online experience as part of daily participation in culture and creativity; as critic Gene McHugh states, post-Internet is “(…)inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials”.
Parallels between the mutability and flux of post-Internet art and the elusive, interdisciplinary nature of contemporary bass music caught MFK and WEN’s attention; as a result, their club events and Urban Mutations’ online presence gained an optical dimension provided by the likes of Katja Novitskova and Harm van der Dorpel. The latter is responsible for VJ-ing as well as visual identity for the nights – digital sculptures that have as much in common with avant-garde jewellery or imaginary scientific devices as they do with software logos. These forms, which – typically for post-Internet art – blur the boundaries between on and offline, also exist in 3D versions, displayed in London’s Wilkinson Gallery.
The resultant, pooled audio-visual experience seems a convincing, semi-synesthetic translation of sound into vision and its inverse; as such (‘mutations’ is the keyword, after all), it embodies the seamless shape-shifting displayed both by contemporary multimedia art and the abundant, fluid genres broadly described as “bass”. Both are extremely elusive; coursing in various directions, reciprocally feeding and capriciously morphing rather than clearly developing from point A to point B, which makes them as difficult to map as they are fascinating to explore. **
“I’m already like, ‘shit, I should just stick with PhotoShop and ordering things from companies, instead of doing it myself.” Katja Novitskova doesn’t know what day it is. She’s been working with “some form of rubber, resin, something” for the upcoming group show ‘Unstable Media’ at Martin van Zomeren gallery in Amsterdam, and it turns out it’s a substance that’s fine for most people but toxic to her. In addition to the blisters she shows me through Skype across her arms, Novitskova is on medication that makes her feel weird and disoriented. She’s a visual artist, working at the centre of the hazy post-internet realm, who is literally allergic to IRL but only some of it. “For the show in Paris [Art of Living at Galerie Valentin], I did a bunch of little knives, they look like a mix of a shank and prehistoric axe, from a different material and that was fine.”
Novitskova also happens to use the word “allergy” to describe her reaction to the use of terms like “neo-liberalism” and “late-capitalism” because as a Bachelor in Semiotics and Culture Studies she’s come to realise there’s a world outside language, while that particular lexicon comes loaded with a critical ideology. But there’s even her own existing ideology, of an integration of online and offline media, that manages to filter through to her own vocabulary. Novitskova refers to her interrogative position on criticality as being a “search mode” and the contemporary visual fashion for Gulf Futurism, as a certain “meme”, started by tumblr and proliferated by the likes of Kari Altmann, Fatima Al-Qadiri, Iain Ball and Emily Jones, among others. Even her own interest in the 2010 trend mutates and manifests itself through her twitter tagline, “everything pseudo-saudi”, referring to her current computer font of choice, while her thumbnailfeatures an Arabic text translation of “I Google Myself”, a piece produced for PWR Paper before the Arab Spring, gaining greater significance thereafter. So, in the context of an artist who’s forgotten that her webcam’s on while itching her arms and blankly staring at her twitter account, it’s these complex interactions between message and mediation, forms and formats, that makes her body of work a most relevant piece of cultural examination, inside and out.
‘Next Best Thing To Being There’. Digital print on canvas bought at Bauhaus chain store in Estonia, ‘Curiosity and Opportunity’, online panorama app displayed on iPad 3 (2012).
It’s interesting that you’re making such tangible, physical work because the aesthetic that you work with seems so virtual.
Katja Novitskova: Yeah but it needs to be materialised. I’m doing this residency in Amsterdam where I have access to these material experiments. One of the premises of me getting this residency was to work with more unexpected materials that I would not be able to access easily, ordering things on line. So the first physical experiment went bad because it made me sick [laughs].
It’s funny you’re having an allergic reaction to the physical product.
KN: I think, intuitively, I know I’m not the person to be this craftsman. I’ve always known that, in a way, but then I’m still eager to explore it a bit more.
I guess your whole practice is based on that integration of physical and virtual modes.
KN: One of the things that I realised I’m trying to communicate is that it’s more a gradient, or spectrum, rather than an opposition between the virtual and physical because it kind of melts into each other. There’s no clear distinction between one and another, in a way. I use the word ‘digital’ rather than ‘virtual’ because it’s a bit more clear, a bit more precise. But now I’m trying to make works that are aware of these gradual translations between the two.
Usually, the point is to outsource this production and to act like this small business entity that makes a file and sends it to another small company that produces it and you get an object. So even the production of the object was a bit outsourced. Now, since I’m in this art context, I decided to play an artist role, to do some craft and do some things, but I already failed at it and something went wrong. Now I’m also exaggerating this artist position a bit and trying to combine the previous method with a bit of a renewal method. For instance, I’m painting things with nail polish and things like that, which I haven’t done before.
It’s interesting that you say ‘digital’ is a more precise term to use because virtual makes it sound like it’s almost imaginary. We’ve always interacted with some kind of interface, pixelated or not. Reading a book offers an experience beyond the physical.
KN: You can even say the alphabet is a form of code. There’s this spectrum of analogue codes becoming digital. It’s not that clear and that’s the interesting part.
You’ve got the same problem with defining what ‘digital culture’ actually is, in distinguishing it from, ‘print’ or even ‘oral’ culture. It all still has something to do with language.
KN: There’s also no real subject. I’m not interested in these distinctions between media. I’m interested in how this new media actively redefines the world and culture, and everything. It’s like the digital medium is just a means to a certain subject, or a certain exploration. Of course, by doing that, you look at the medium itself but it’s not the subject.
Orlando group exhibition installation view.
Do you think about your aesthetic being formalised in some away?
KN: Like a sort of schematic? The main aesthetical principle that I have is it has to trigger something in my brain and I think that every artist has their own thing that makes them make certain aesthetic choices over others. I’m very aware that I have this because when I make work, apart from the conceptual, it’s a very visual process. And at a certain point I just make these choices that feel right. That can end up indeed being some kind of formula that I have and it’s just a way of making, on one hand.
On the other, my work is about this playing with formats; existing formats like file formats all the way to the object format. Then it’s species, ideologies, even certain things that come into existence and then expire. I like this word ‘format’. I’m consciously playing with these formats, of course, and even with formats that are present in contemporary art. For instance, there’s this format of print on the wall, or of painting, or sculpture. I’m half consciously playing with all these formats. It’s like the smartphone as a format. This is more the material form of it but the detail and aesthetic choices are not a formula that I have, they’re very… I really have to like it myself before I make use of it [laughs].
Obviously, they bare close resemblance to corporate aesthetics.
KN: Well, the corporate aesthetic is a format and I’m making a use of it. Stock animal documentary is a format, stock photography is a format, stock photography that deals with economics is a format. It’s a little pool of imagery that a lot of people make use of and that’s really popular… certain animals symbolising wild nature or something. I make use of this quite consciously and because I’m trying to mix the corporate aesthetic with the natural aesthetic, I’m trying to expose both of them as formats. I’m also interested in the nature of economics so it works on several layers, it works in this very visual layer but it also works on a conceptual layer, for me.
That idea of the economy in your work is reflective of the use of these formats that market an experience or “authenticity” through this construct of nature through imagery.
KN: I think Timur Si-Qin and Agatha Wara, who I worked with before, write about this. They explain things better than I would, but I agree with them that it’s basically objects and imagery and the whole ecological layer on the societies, which is there to grab our attention and to sell us something. In order for this to happen, the image itself, or the stories that they’re showing have to grab our attention. So there’s a certain visual narrative element that they use and they think work.
I’m more interested in it in terms of material. There’s so much more art in advertisement, this mass of things, the banners, the cut-outs, the displays, the flags, the pens; all this marketing stuff that is being produced massively every year, or images just to be this interface between certain products and people. In a way, I think it makes sense to think of art in relation to this attention-grabbing advertisement, especially how it exists online. Where it can be as public as an artwork, where everything is democratic. That’s at least a few years ago, where there was no differentiation if you were looking at advertisement images or art online; it’s just a jpeg.
It’s all connected. Obviously as an artist, or a person, you respond to your context and your context is a world of advertising.
KN: Yeah it’s environment and it’s an environment, which is trying to grab our attention. Of course, we’re so aware of it by now that, I think, a lot of us choose which advertisement to be affected by and which not. It’s a bit like that with art, except art is just like an advertisement of itself already [laughs].**
Katja Novitskova’s work will be showing at two group exhibitions at Martin van Zomeren in Amsterdam and Galerie Valentin in Paris, starting June 22, 2013.
