Former Somerset House Studios resident

Manu Luksch

Artist, researcher and filmmaker who works outside the frame; scrutinises the effects of network technologies on social relations, urban space, and political structures.

Somerset House Studios

New Wing

Recipient of the Open Society Fellowship 2018, Manu’s work scrutinises the effects of network technologies on social relations, urban space, and political structures. From drawing and software, to telematic performance and feature film, her work interrogates technological notions of progress and the regulation of public space, the disciplining of time, and autonomy and identity in a hyper-connected world. Techniques and effects of live data transmission provide the theme, medium, and performative space for many of her works.

Exhibitions and festivals include Hybrid Landscapes at Digital Catapult, Onassis Cultural Centre Athens, Hasselblad Foundation Göteborg, National Museum of Art Riga, Library of Congress Washington DC and Whitechapel Art Gallery London. Awards include Winner of the Moscow International Documentary Film Festival 2016, Marianne.von.Willemer Prize for Digital Art 2012 (Ars Electronica Centre) and the Austrian National Media Art Stipend 2012. Her work is held in the Collection de Centre Pompidou; BFI National Archive; Ars Electronica Centre; Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, and she is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Mapping CCTV in Whitehall

A lively, visually enthralling attempt to gaze into the future by remembering the past.

The New York Times on Dreams Rewired

As part of her Open Society Fellowship, Manu will focus on producing a ‘tactical fiction’ installation piece that draws attention to the effects on notions of privacy, autonomy and social sorting in particular by the rise of quantified, algorithmically-managed societies.