Katja Novitskova Creates an Alien Landing Site in New York’s City Hall Park
The list of movies in which the apocalypse hits New York isn’t short. There’s The Day After Tomorrow, with the Statue of Liberty memorably freezing over after a global-warming disaster. There’s Cloverfield, with the Statue of Liberty’s head getting flung like a child’s toy across Manhattan. And there’s Transformers, with giant Autobots toppling skyscrapers in a moment that eerily recalls 9/11. In addition: Escape from New York, 2012, Knowing, The Avengers, Independence Day, and many other films.
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“As a foreigner, you think of Lower Manhattan as the place where shit happens,” the Estonian-born, Berlin-based artist Katja Novitskova told me recently in the teeming streets of New York. “If Godzilla comes to town, he’ll come through here. If there’s a tsunami, it’ll come here. If there are aliens, they’ll go to Washington, but they’ll pass by.”
Novitskova was in town to oversee the installation of her own “alien landing site” in City Hall Park: an exhibition of photo-sculptures that opened on June 22 and runs into November by way of the Public Art Fund. The show’s works—blown-up pictures sourced from the internet and mounted on aluminum cut-outs—are surreal combinations of nature photography and space imagery. An oversized lizard hand is superimposed over a shot of Earth; a ball of E. coli cells appears to be growing. Rarely ever are Novitskova’s sculptures this dark and this funny.
Katja Novitskova
For Novitskova, the New York show, much like her Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, mirrors the mindset of many scientists today. It is slick and seemingly optimistic, though its subject matter is actually fairly nightmarish. When I suggested as much, she responded, “Yeah! That’s good. That’s the point. There’s definitely a dark undertone to this.”
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