Lawrence Lek: NOX

LAS Art Foundation presents NOX, Lawrence Lek’s largest and most ambitious exhibition to date. Unfolding over three floors of the Kranzler Eck complex in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, it is the first project to combine all strands of Lek’s multidisciplinary practice — sound, installation, CGI video and game design — at an architectural scale. This format mirrors the interactive immersion of an open-world video game, or what Lek describes as ‘site-specific simulation’ — a unified environment in which physical and virtual elements hold equal weight.

The exhibition imagines the building as a rehabilitation centre for self-driving cars, creating a speculative fiction that imagines the psychological consequences of a future filled with smart systems and sentient machines. The installation guides visitors through different scenes from this near-future world, with an interactive audio system that triggers voice logs and evolving soundscapes depending on the visitor’s location. Opening at the site of a crash on a nocturnal highway, NOX evokes the moody urban settings of film noir, a genre characterised by dark, dreamlike qualities. Characters in film noir are on a search for meaning, piecing together memories and clues to make sense of the tumultuous world around them. Similarly, visitors entering NOX are tasked with interpreting fragments of communication that slowly mount a picture of life in a world of advanced automation. 

“Guanyin is a carebot, the program in charge of treatments at NOX. She told me I’ve been enrolled in a charity subscription service for runaway cars like me. Problem cars who need retraining in Nonhuman Excellence.” — ENIGMA-76, 3 April 20XX

Lek’s hour-long narrative follows the journey of Enigma-76, a promising but troubled self-driving car, as they undergo a five-day rehabilitation programme at NOX, a centre for “Nonhuman Excellence” operated by their parent company Farsight. Enigma-76’s voice logs describe their experience and innermost thoughts as they navigate a system designed to monitor and correct their performance. The exhibition culminates in an interactive training simulation that puts audiences in the role of trainee Farsight psychologists, tasked with treating wayward cars using physical and discursive therapy techniques.

Lawrence Lek is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in London. He is recognised for a conceptually rigorous practice in which he explores the myth of technological progress in an age of artificial intelligence and social change. Lek is perhaps best known for advancing non-Western Futurist practices in the context of East Asia, imagining how agency may be restored to the Other — whether racialised or nonhuman — within his video games, video essays and cinematic narratives.

NOX expands Lek’s “Sinofuturist cinematic universe” — interconnected films, games, installations and soundtracks that interrogate concepts of AI, its capacity for consciousness and the emergence of posthuman identity. The exhibition deepens his focus on the psychology of artificial consciousness, smart cities and autonomous transportation. It probes the inseparability of artificial minds and bodies, the operations of memory and trauma, and the implications of living within smart systems. Poetic and poignant in equal measure, NOX raises timely questions about agency, obsolescence, ethics and empathy between humans and the machines they make.

To complement NOX, LAS has commissioned the essay ‘Becoming Smart’ by technology historian Orit Halpern, which examines the concept of smartness that shapes Lawrence Lek’s world-building.


Visiting the exhibition
NOX is on view until January 14, 2024.

Location:
Kranzler Eck
Joachimsthaler Straße 7
10623 Berlin

Open on
Tuesday–Sunday, 2–9pm

Closed on
Monday
December 24–26
December 31
January 1

Tickets
Tickets are available to book at las-art.foundation.
15 EUR / 10 EUR reduced

Visitors are invited to book a free ticket for the exhibition on the following Tuesdays: 
December 5
December 19
January 2

Notes to editors
Press contacts
Felix Thon: felix.thon [​at​] las-art.foundation / T +49 152 526 107 23
Selin Sahin: selin.sahin [​at​] las-art.foundation / T +49 152 226 519 76

About LAS Art Foundation
LAS Art Foundation works with visionary artists to give form to future imaginaries. We commission exhibitions, performances and experimental formats which bring new perspectives to the critical subjects of our times, from artificial intelligence, gaming and quantum computing to ecology and biotechnology.