If Only You Could See What I've Seen with Your Eyes

Commissioner: Maria Arusoo. Curator: Kati Ilves. Espositore: Katja Novitskova.

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.