MIRROR LIFE: KATJA NOVITSKOVA

MIRROR LIFE explores the evolving entanglement between biological life and digital systems, examining how generative technologies, synthetic materials, and physical memory reconfigure the boundaries of species and perception.

Novitskova’s new sculptures meditate on potentials of synthetic biology. Shimmering in shades of blue, these brooding forms return the viewer’s gaze with a hybrid sentience as part biological and part algorithmic. Composed of polyurethane resin embedded with minerals such as obsidian, hematite, and labradorite, the sculptures suggest a speculative taxonomy: entities born from a process that fuses 3D modeling, AI-driven crossbreeding, and studio craft. They exist not merely as objects, but as living approximations that are suspended between ancestral memory and imagined future trajectories.

The Earthware series expands Novitskova’s ongoing inquiry into vision and representation. Cephalopods emerge through digital images transferred onto epoxy clay via a process the artist has developed over a decade. Red lenticular eyes pierce the surfaces, endowing the works with a sentience. Brooding squid mothers carry around their giant egg sacs with millions of eggs until they hatch. During this period they are not able to eat, resulting in senescence, a life phase that begins with eggs hatching and ends with their death. Devoid of nutrients and strength, their bodies begin to disintegrate. Their anatomy can be viewed as giant compound eyes made of tiny paralarvae that devour their own mothers. Novitskova’s wall works read like premonitions: mineralized traces of once-living organisms, now re-coded as synthetic relics.

Novitskova draws parallels between biological metamorphosis and the latent operations of generative AI. Just as a butterfly retains neural echoes of its caterpillar form, machine learning models encode spectral remnants of their training data. ‘Mirror life’ refers to a speculative form of existence that emerges in parallel to our current biological life, but with inverted molecular structures. Many vital molecules for life on Earth, like sugars and amino-acids, come in two mirror-image forms: 'left-handed’ and ‘right-handed.’ This handedness describes the direction polarized light bends when it passes through a pure solution of the molecule. However, living organisms typically use only one of these forms. Mirror life would be life with mirror-reflected molecular structures. If it could exist or be synthesized it would be very similar to biology we know, but exist in a parallel space of interactions with possibly catastrophic overlaps with our own current life forms. 

How would this mirror life look, and how would it look at us? Perhaps a set of artificially synthesized primitive life forms emerges, branching into a novel path for life. A common ancestral community of primitive cells that develops into a living thing, a genetically modified feral organism. 

The exhibition unfolds in a space where biological memory, digital transformation, and material speculation converge. Referencing phenomena such as embryogenesis, cell fate, and the autonomy of generative algorithms, MIRROR LIFE invites viewers into a zone of mirrored evolution, where artificial organisms brood their offspring, observe, and mutate. Novitskova shifts forms across categories and timelines: an egg becomes an eye, an image becomes a mineral, and life itself is rendered as a composite process of translation.