If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes and If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, Stage 2 – Katja Novitskova

If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes is an exhibition catalog showing the work of Katja Novitskova. Commissioned by the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) for the Estonian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, it was copublished by Sternberg Press in May 2017. In 2018, a sequel titled If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, Stage 2 was published by the Art Museum of Estonia – Kumu Art Museum.

Both books were designed by Ott Metusala. For the titles and the headings, Metusala chose FF Blur. The titles are composed of different font sizes and with a significant texture game to blend with the textures of Novitskova’s work.

While the cover of the first catalog featured a leopoard, the second one depicts a bee. There are many animal representations in the books in connection with the artist’s vision at the heart of the ecological crisis. We can find wild and genetically modified life forms in the exhibition as on the cover.

From the exhibition notes about the second show:

Stage 2 works from the intersection of big data-driven industries and the expanding domain of seeing in the thick of ecological crisis. The display is an immersive environment inhabited by living machines, graphic charts embedded in synthetic materials, and two-dimensional sculptures of wild and genetically modified life forms. (…)

“If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes,” says the replicant Roy Batty to the maker of his eyes in the sci-fi film Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott. Katja Novitskova and the curator Kati Ilves borrowed the quote for the title of the exhibition in the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017, produced by the Centre for Contemporary Arts Estonia.

Katja Novitskova (b. 1984) is an artist originally from Tallinn, but living and working mainly in Berlin and Amsterdam. Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture, digital technologies, and speculative fiction: she is interested in how the rapidly changing planet is increasingly dependent on various data streams that mediate, preserve, and alter the environment around us in visual form.