Worms make up the majority of living animals on this planet: it is their world.

At the centre of Katja Novitskova’s work are images of Caenorhabditis Elegans, microscopic round worms used in bio-medical research as model organisms. Due to their distant evolutionary relation to us and the relative simplicity of their bodies, they are one of the most common lab animals and are used extensively around the world on an industrial scale.

In her oeuvre, Novitskova maps biological areas that are no longer outside but rather ‘inside’ biological bodies, seeking to capture human expansion that is not just geographical but rather biological: genomes, bio-molecular structures, neural firings and embryogenesis, as well as other inner workings of human and non-human life. Her projects focus on unrecognised non-human ‘labourers’, which are crucial to contemporary medical and fundamental research, highlighting the ecological imprint of their existence in the world of data. All of this is an essential concern in an era when big-data analysis, genetic engineering, AI and the colossal amount of digital pattern processing generate an enormous amount of data and images.

Novitskova’s works address the complexity and inevitable failures of depicting the world through technologically-driven narratives and draw attention to the tools of mediation and representation used to depict the realm of nature.

The installation evokes the world of ‘aliens’ depicted in science-fiction films and raises questions related to new biotechnologies mediated through algorithms and artificial intelligence as well as to the imminent role of the non-human. In her work, Novitskova appears to delve into the depths of the inner world rather than into the future.

(Borbála Szalai)