Luca E. Lum is an artist and writer
My work explores the historical entanglement of the animal and the machine, becoming mirrors, proxies, and instruments that parse crisis and change, anticipation and catastrophe. I also narrativise and parse the aesthetics and horror of what I term as "ghostless" or "post-hauntological time" – a condition where the ghost is alienated from its labours. I look at misrecognition as an organising principle in technocapitalism.
I write on death, illness, abandonment, disembodiment, sex and the erotic, ecological grief, and species memory. I have been published by the Asian Film Archive, Nang Magazine, Cthulhu Books, and National Gallery Singapore's online platform.
Between 2019-2020 I was research assistant and illustrator for an archaeological study of material heritage in Sumatra, Indonesia as part of the Maldives Heritage Survey, which aimed to to document cultural heritage vulnerable to human and environmental threats, at the Earth Observatory of Singapore.
Singapore inspires much of my (dis)orientations around time, metabolic control, misrecognition, and the horror of being anesthetized from loss.
I was co-founder and co-director of soft/WALL/studs, a collaboratively held space, shared library, and series of actions in Singapore that experimented with renewed situations of discursivity, agency, autonomy, and communality, between 2016-2021.
MS Art, Culture, and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University (cross-registration)
BA (First Class) English Literature from the National University of Singapore, University Scholars Program
Yale Visiting International Students Program 2012-2013
My projects have been supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Delfina Foundation, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and A. Farm Saigon.
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Open for commissions, teaching, and speaking engagements, as well as videography, editorial, and illustration work.
ACT profile Delfina Foundation profile
Contact: ecl.luca@gmail.com, lumecl@mit.edu
Instagram: oneirocritica
Current locations: Singapore, New York City and Cambridge (MA)