Luca E. Lum is an interdisciplinary artist and writer.Â
🥚
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. Her background in painting and drawing, literature, critical theory, and devised theater, lend to her diverse approaches.
Characterised by alienated and somber mise-en-scenes, Luca's work explores how non/inhuman agencies complicate and produce emergent forms of time, subjectivity, world, and vision. Her subject matter, ranging from the entwinement of animals and machines, dreamscapes, a large language model platform, a neighbourhood, all form ways she examines the genres of sensing and our attempts to contain and encounter the real.Â
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.Â
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. Whichever form of her choice is an engine to parse experience and to uncover its granularity. To observe the architecture of a boundary and what comes after re-enchants thought and experience.Â
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 holds an MS in Art, Culture, and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the National University of Singapore.
She is an alumnus of Materia Abierta (Mexico City), the Delfina Foundation (London), the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore), the Triple Canopy Publication Intensive (NYC) , Curating Lab (Singapore), and the Yale Visiting International Student Program.
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.Â
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.
