A deep-dive into artist Lawrence Lek’s latest artwork spanning three floors of a former department store

Kristian Vistrup Madsen

A futuristic exhibition uses AI to bring cars to life in Berlin

Capitalism is about speculation; it looks to the future. And speculations yield boom as well as bust, a fact that the uneven landscape of Germany’s capital is testament to. Just off Berlin’s famous shopping mile, Ku’damm, a massive domed building has stood abandoned since its former occupant, Karstadt, the country’s largest chain of department stores, evidently failed to meet the brutal reality of retail. Now, the hordes of shoppers milling out of the adjacent train station meet what looks like another, more sophisticated, type of retail experience: Dark billboards in front of the former Karstadt spell out the word ‘NOX’ amid a rendering of a black car driving toward the distinctive domed premises. The branding is familiar from the new electric car makers gaining visibility in big cities everywhere; uber-slick boutiques that seem to sell not just vehicles but whole worlds, distinct visions of the future.

But the future on offer at ‘NOX’, artist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/42605/Lawrence-Lek" target="_blank">Lawrence Lek</a>’s exhibition with LAS Art Foundation, is of a somewhat more ambivalent nature. Inside, a single, narrative installation spreads across the three floors of the former department store, inviting visitors explore what appears to be a cross between a car dealership – anonymous black cars are scattered around the ground level – and an alien, high-tech mechanic’s workshop, while fragments of the story are automatically transmitted to headsets according to where one is in the space. On the ground and first floors, large screens showcase a two-chapter video set in a meticulously rendered landscape of empty highways bathed in the warm light of sunset, and populated by a restless, driverless car alone in transit. From here, the story spills over into physical car parts, tires, and a grey waiting room, exactly like one that also appears in the film. ‘I wanted to create a walk-through experience of a video game but made physical,’ Lek says. ‘An experience that is at once virtual and site-specific.’

LAS Art Foundation is a private Berlin-based enterprise that, since 2019, has created large-scale installations in untraditional exhibition venues, such as the night clubs Tresor and Berghain, both of which are housed in former power plants. 
‘From the very beginning, LAS has been focused on artists working at the intersection of science and technology, around topics such as planetary thinking, AI, and gaming,’ the foundation’s senior curator Carly Whitefield explains. ‘We are not necessarily looking for projects that are already in that space, but rather we are open to any format where a sense of interdisciplinarity is key, and we work with artists over a period of 2 or 3 years to develop their work and find the right location for it.’
Amid these concerns, visions of the future loom large: ‘We find that the future is often imagined from corporate perspectives, which tend to omit, for instance, the question of the body,’ she continues. ‘We work with artists who are reflecting more critically on what lies just beyond the horizon and push their respective media [be that technology or a more traditional artistic technique] beyond what has seemed possible.’

In the winter of 2021, the renowned choreographer Sharon Eyal and her co-creator Gai Behar certainly pushed their dancers beyond the usual bounds of the body – even for ballet – as they pointe-worked the concrete floors of Tresor for a series of performances commissioned by LAS. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker is a garden project in collaboration with LAS and Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde ongoing through 2026. ‘It is important to us,’ Whitefield says, ‘that both these projects are also considered exhibitions, and not events, because it challenges our ideas about how exhibitions occupy space and function temporally.’
Temporality in ‘NOX’ is likewise complex and layered. Its protagonist Enigma, a self-driving car en route to self-discovery, is not yet part of our world, though she looks much like the vanguard species coming from brands like Polestar, Lucid, and NIO, and the half-built cities on China’s New Silk Road that she traverses are already long in the making. Audiences move seamlessly between the advanced retail models popping up on Ku’damm and Lek’s uncanny fabulation; in capitalism, the future is always already here. ‘I am working with an idea of the future, not as a specific point in time but as a continuum,’ Lek says. ‘I am interested in how future subjectivity is developed – be it human or AI – and that development is already behind us.’

NOX is the name of Enigma’s maker, her motherboard. Throughout the story, she follows the tracks of her now-obsolete ancestors, as if on a quasi-Buddhist journey through past lives, haunted by existential anxiety of planned obsolescence. As we go deeper into NOX, we really go deeper into Enigma’s mind, where her concerns echo our own: ‘What upgrades will I miss if I leave the system?’ she wonders, just as we might about the surveillance systems underlying, for instance, social media.
Lek’s work, though it does not include a single human body, is very much about human psychology, physical health, labor, and our relationship to the structure we are living (and dying) in. It takes the form of the Odyssey, or a classic road movie, except the world through which we travel is, as Lek says, ‘no longer mysterious and unknown, but disenchanted, fully mapped by satellites. What can exploration mean today? And what kind of subjectivity emerges from it?’
LAS will continue its nomadic activity in years to come, Whitefield explains, both as a way of giving access to strange or liminal spaces in the city as well as to access new audiences: ‘Pedestrian traffic on Ku’damm is huge, and it means we get a much more diverse group of people coming in who don’t necessarily know what to expect.’ On the third floor of ‘NOX’, shoppers-turned-exhibitiongoers are once again recast as gamers. In a final twist in the tale, Enigma’s world goes metaverse, and we, no longer merely witnesses, become the agents of her fate, controllers of a game interface that outfits Enigma like a Sims character. In the world of AI, who really manipulates who? It is a good question, to which ‘NOX’ gives no easy answer. Probably time will tell.

Lawrence Lek is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1262/Sadie-Coles-HQ" target="_blank">Sadie Coles HQ</a> (London).
Lawrence Lek’s ‘NOX’, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, is on view at Kranzler Eck (Joachimsthaler Straße 7, 10623 Berlin) through January 14, 2024.
Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer and art
critic based in Berlin. His work has been published in magazines including Artforum,
Frieze, Mousse, and The White Review. His book Doing Time: Essays
on Using People was published by Floating Opera Press in 2021.&nbsp;
Published on December 15, 2023.
Captions for full-bleed images: 1 and&nbsp;2.&nbsp;Lawrence Lek, NOX, 2023. © Lawrence Lek. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Photographs by&nbsp;Andrea Rossetti. 3.&nbsp;Lawrence Lek, NOX, 2023. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. © Lawrence Lek.

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A deep-dive into artist Lawrence Lek’s latest artwork spanning three floors of a former department store

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