A Living Error is more than aflawor glitch in the system. It is an unforeseen deviation that does not signify failure, but transformation—a beginningfrom which something new emerges. Life forms that fall outside the grid: hybrid, ambiguous, in a state of perpetual becoming.
On the occasion of the exhibitionLIVING ERRORS, the gallery MARTINETZ is transformed into an interdisciplinarylaboratory. Katja Novitskova, Eva Papamargariti, and Mary-Audrey Ramirez conduct speculative research at the intersection of art, biology,ecology, and technology—beyond the test tube, beyond genetic manipulation.The beings that emerge here are plausible, but not yet real. Theyfitinto no category. That, too, is a Living Error: a form that falls outside the grid, simply because the grid is too narrow.
What connects the three positions is a shared perspective: one that reaches beyond the human and perceives the non-human not as a threat, but as transformative potential.Their hybrid beings—critters, mutants, approximations—resist binary categorisation. They are neither entirely organic nor entirely mechanical, neither fully real nor purely fictional.
Katja Novitskova delves deep into scientific databases—into genomic landscapes, protein models, and the image data of wildlife cameras that ceaselessly document the non-human. What she finds there, she transfers onto plates of synthetic clay, printedwith UV ink. Like ancient clay tablets, these works capture the poetics of numerical vision—and become cultural fossils at the very moment of their creation. What can we learn about the world when we explore it through a gaze that is more than human, and cease to place ourselves at the centre? Perhaps that our perceptionis very monotonous and limited—and that shifts in perspective hold enormous potential.
Eva Papamargariti gives form to digital hybrid creatures in ceramics and moving images—bodies suspended between matter and code, between the present and an as yet unwritten tomorrow. Her practice explores the corporeal as a fluid concept, shaped by technologyand the countless non-human actors that inhabit our world. The error lives here in the in-between: in the not-yet-finished, in the being that refuses definition—and in doing so raises the question of whether the boundary between human and non-human was ever as clear as we thought.
Mary-Audrey Ramirez first models her critters in digital space before translating them into 3D-printed sand. Her creatures spring from a visual world of gaming and digital pop culture, yet feel timeless—like gargoyles that have passed through an algorithm.They carry no sense of menace: what we encounter here are insectoid and reptilian beings that disarm us with their strangeness just as much as they enchant us with a peculiar cuteness—critters that awaken in us an impulse to care. Especially when they meet us
on picture carriers of finely shimmering satin.
Together, the three artists sketch a speculative form of coexistence: LIVING ERRORS creates a laboratory in which errors need not be studied and corrected, but where the strange—so often associated with threat—is welcomed. An invitation to entertain the idea that errors do not mean the end of the world, but can be the beginningof something new—and perhaps, too, to accept oneself and others, with all their imperfections and flaws.
–Sophia Naumann
