Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.

Manifesta 15 Barcelona took place in Barcelona and 11 surrounding cities ot its metropolitan region.

Katja Novitskova, EE

Katja Novitskova’s works include sculptures generated from existing online imagery and text, installations, video and artist publications. In her work, she attempts to capture the human expansion that is not just geographical (as applied to peoples, territories and mineral resources), but rather biological: genomes, bio-molecular structures, neural firings, embryogenesis and other inner workings of human and nonhuman life. The frontier logic comes with the requirement for extensive mapping, which – in an era of big-data analysis, genetic engineering and AI – means a colossal amount of digital pattern processing, a lot of it in the form of images. Novitskova often uses this visual information taken from mainly scientific sources (images of the lab worm species C. Elegans, datasets of automatic wildlife photographs) as a material in her work. Creating arrays of translation between various media, she is interested in the form-generating potential of art and its capacity to extrapolate current trends and realities.