Luca E. Lum
Luca is an artist and writer. Her work examines arrhythmias of time, language, and body. She is a final year graduate student in the Art Culture + Technology program (SMACT) under Professor Renée Green.
She co-founded soft/WALL/studs (2016-2021), a collaboratively held space, shared library, and series of actions located in Geylang, Singapore, that experimented with renewed situations of discursivity, agency, autonomy, and communality.
Projects
Ghostless (2023-)
"To be haunted", Avery Gordon writes, "is to be tied to historical and social effects". Through moving image and sound, "Ghostless" considers another kind of horror – one that is about the absence of haunting and disturbance, through a meditation on temporal structures created by technopolitical assemblages of speed, anticipation, predetermination, and control.
For more information about the project, email lumecl@mit.edu.
For more information about the project, email lumecl@mit.edu.
...weed water waits in deer-well dark lines extending from the preorbital gland dropping from canthus secreting oil and sweat a notational inkwell recently a sensitivity and slowness a swelling even my hooves tender...
--
Conceived as a series of memory cycles combining writing and archival research, the unfurling work considers a collective herd and ecological memory that dies, resurfaces, and transforms with the disappearance and reappearance of the Milu, a once extirpated deer in China, against a backdrop of land reforms in the UK and the Boxer’s Rebellion in China across the 19th-21st centuries.
The first text from this project was published in "Making Kin" in 2022 (Cthulhu Books, editorial platform for the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid): https://cthulhubooks.com/Making-Kin and a continuation of the research was enabled by the Delfina Foundation, London, in Winter 2023.
Excerpt available upon request
--
Conceived as a series of memory cycles combining writing and archival research, the unfurling work considers a collective herd and ecological memory that dies, resurfaces, and transforms with the disappearance and reappearance of the Milu, a once extirpated deer in China, against a backdrop of land reforms in the UK and the Boxer’s Rebellion in China across the 19th-21st centuries.
The first text from this project was published in "Making Kin" in 2022 (Cthulhu Books, editorial platform for the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid): https://cthulhubooks.com/Making-Kin and a continuation of the research was enabled by the Delfina Foundation, London, in Winter 2023.
Excerpt available upon request
Framed drawings in pastel, charcoal, pencil, coloured pencil, tracing paper, two dreams bracketing one text message, a fortnight
Explores the body as receiver and drawing as a form of psychic notation; how the drawing out of an interior line from the body involves repetition, intensification, transmissions, and compulsion. Imagery derived from two dream sequences that bracketed the reception of a charged transmitted message.
Shown as part of “The whole star is a moving skin”, a trio exhibition of Aubrie James (SMACT ‘24), Luca E. Lum (SMACT ‘25), and Zhanyi Chen (SMACT ‘24).
In this exhibition, the three artists explore relationships with our temporal and spatial environments through the lens of yearning and loss. The title is a line taken from a machine-aided translation of Shakespeare’s famous love sonnet 116 by Rena J. Mosteirin. In the book, the machine, moving through various languages – including code – rends new expressions and skeins of meaning, mapping an unexpected idiom. The exhibition aims to delve into the matter of our relationship with animate and inanimate worlds by paying close attention to intimate and transcorporeal minglings. Aubrie’s portals explore the desire to connect to somewhere while feeling as if nowhere; Luca’s somatic translations of her psychic life contend with her compulsion to find the edges of her interior; Zhanyi’s rain poems examine how mourning persists in the natural and constructed environments around us.
Each work invites visitors to confront and rethink their perception of reality, aligning with Mario Perniola’s vision of becoming “things that feel,” and forging an alliance between senses and inorganic entities. They take what can feel large and foreign and find their intimacies.
Explores the body as receiver and drawing as a form of psychic notation; how the drawing out of an interior line from the body involves repetition, intensification, transmissions, and compulsion. Imagery derived from two dream sequences that bracketed the reception of a charged transmitted message.
Shown as part of “The whole star is a moving skin”, a trio exhibition of Aubrie James (SMACT ‘24), Luca E. Lum (SMACT ‘25), and Zhanyi Chen (SMACT ‘24).
In this exhibition, the three artists explore relationships with our temporal and spatial environments through the lens of yearning and loss. The title is a line taken from a machine-aided translation of Shakespeare’s famous love sonnet 116 by Rena J. Mosteirin. In the book, the machine, moving through various languages – including code – rends new expressions and skeins of meaning, mapping an unexpected idiom. The exhibition aims to delve into the matter of our relationship with animate and inanimate worlds by paying close attention to intimate and transcorporeal minglings. Aubrie’s portals explore the desire to connect to somewhere while feeling as if nowhere; Luca’s somatic translations of her psychic life contend with her compulsion to find the edges of her interior; Zhanyi’s rain poems examine how mourning persists in the natural and constructed environments around us.
Each work invites visitors to confront and rethink their perception of reality, aligning with Mario Perniola’s vision of becoming “things that feel,” and forging an alliance between senses and inorganic entities. They take what can feel large and foreign and find their intimacies.
Publications
