Katja Novitskova to represent Estonia at 57th la Biennale di Venezia

The project 'If Only You Could See What I've Seen with Your Eyes' by artist Katja Novitskova and curator Kati Ilves has been selected to represent Estonia at the 57th Venice Biennale. 

Katja Novitskova's project 'If Only You Could See What I've Seen with Your Eyes', curated by Kati Ilves, is a compelling exhibition that interrogates the world around us while courageously reevaluating gender and age conventions. Novitskova's sculptural and photographic work challenges the notion of the authenticity of the image and our relationship to physical space in the digital age. Her practice takes us to unknown places and forces us, the viewers, to step out of our comfort zone in order to think and reflect on a language that is not yet familiar to us. Novitskova explores a future which has already happened and the present that we have failed to recognise as the world yet to come.

Katja Novitskova is an Estonian-born artist working in Amsterdam and Berlin. Her works, sculptures reminiscent of images sourced online, have attracted a great deal of international attention. Last year, she was included in the group exhibition Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at MoMa in New York. 

Kati Ilves works as a curator of contemporary art at the Art Museum of Estonia and has curated several major exhibitions in Estonia in recent years. For example, she curated Merike Estna's solo exhibition The Blue Lagoon in 2014 at the Kumu Gallery of Contemporary Art and, with Estna, the international exhibition I'm a Painting. The exhibition Kumu Hits. Contemporary Art from the Collection of the Art Museum of Estonia, curated by Kati Ilves with Annika Räim and Eha Komissarov, is currently on show at Kumu.

Jury members included Maria Arusoo (the commissioner for the Estonian Pavilion at Venice Biennale), Kaido Ole, Sirje Helme, Rael Artel and Ingrid Ruudi (members of the board of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Estonia), Maria-Kristiina Soomre (Estonian Ministry of Culture), Ekow Eshun (Creative Director of Calvert 22), Sebastian Cichocki (deputy director at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw) and Martha Kirszenbaum (curator and founder of Fahrenheit, Los Angeles).

Estonia's participation in the Venice Biennale is organized by the Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia and funded by the Estonian Ministry of Culture.

Additional information
Maria Arusoo
Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia
www.cca.ee/en
maria@cca.ee
post@cca.ee