Luca E. Lum is an interdisciplinary artist and writer with a background in literature and critical theory. She works omnivorously between language and the visual, across moving image, installation, drawing, collaboration, performance, and writing, to explore tensions between the sayable and swallowed, amid mediated conceptions of time, futures, and the social. 

She is interested in how non/inhuman agencies complicate and produce emergent forms of time, subjectivity, world, and vision. Growing up in Singapore, she witnessed firsthand how systems of power and control create metabolisms and atmospheres for the body and the social to become felt, ambient, embodied, and desirable. 

Her practice is motivated by an attunement towards hidden and complex dispositions of time, body, and affect – as well as non-normative senses of futurity and agency. 

Through her work, she seeks to recover a more capacious vocabulary to describe the present while reconstituting – in spaces and subjects – dispositions otherwise rendered unimaginable and materially impoverished by epistemic fields and extractive systems that purport to sustain life. Pressing the visual, linguistic and the performative against each other, she attempts to navigate disciplinary traps and enclosures, while accessing a wider repertoire of gestures.

She was a co-founder of soft/WALL/studs (2016-2021), a collaboratively held space, shared library, and series of actions in Singapore that experimented with renewed situations of discursivity, agency, autonomy, and communality.

Her work has been supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Delfina Foundation, NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore, among others. Her writing has appeared in cthulhu books, Nang Magazine, the Asian Film Archive, and the online platform of the National Gallery Singapore.