Artist Katja Novitskova (Left) and curator Kati Ilves celebrated the announcement with this photo on Facebook, enhanced by cats.
Photo: via Facebook, courtesy the artist

Artist Katja Novitskova will represent her native Estonia at next year’s Venice Biennale with a project curated by Kati Ilves, the Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia (CCA) announced yesterday.

Novitskova and Ilves won the competition launched by the CCA with an exhibition proposal titled “If only you could see what I’ve seen in your eyes.” Their concept for the Estonian Pavilion is based on Novitskova’s approach to visual language, which explores the ways in which our processing of visual information has become inured to digital images and representations rooted in new technologies.

The press release, translated by artnet News, explains that the jury selected the project out of five proposals for its topicality, and poignant reflection on digital behavior. Jury member Martha Kirszenbaum—founder and curator at Fahrenheit, Los Angeles—describes Novitskova as a pioneering artist of her generation on an international scale. “She was one of the first to have used, in the early 2010s, post-Internet concepts and sensibilities in her work,” says Kirszenbaum.

Katja Novitskova, Pattern of Activation (2014)
Photo: courtesy Kraupa Tuskany Zeidler gallery, Berlin; Greene Naftali, New York.

CAA director and supervisor of the Estonian pavilion Maria Arusoo adds, “Novitskova is now at an important moment in her career […] Her work has a wide international reach, both in its subject matters as well as in its audience.”

Novitskova, whose career has been on a meteoric rise right from the start, works and lives in Amsterdam and Berlin. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world including “Life Itself” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the 2015 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; the 13th Biennale de Lyon; and “No Man’s Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection” in Miami. Her new solo show “Dawn Mission” opens this weekend at the Kunstverein Hamburg.

Katja Novitkova, installation view from “PATTERN OF ACTIVATION (planetary bonds)”
Photo: courtesy the artist; Kraupa Tuskany Zeidler gallery, Berlin; Greene Naftali, New York.

Kati Ilves (1984, Estonia) is a curator at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, the largest of the five branches of the Art Museum of Estonia. Estonia has been participating at the Venice Biennale since 1997, making this the 11th pavilion presented by the Baltic country.