This autumn, Goldsmiths CCA will host the largest UK institutional exhibition to date of London-based artist Lawrence Lek (b.1982, DE). Known internationally for single-project presentations combining film, installation, video games, and sound, this exhibition is the first to interweave multiple strands of Lek’s ongoing cinematic universe. For over a decade, Lek has developed a practice he describes as ‘worldbuilding for non-humans’, centering his narrative around Sinofuturism: a speculative framework in which the problems and promises of artificial intelligence and China’s technological influence converge. At turns dark and playful, his work is powerfully affective, featuring a recurring cast of characters who ask us what it means to exist in an age of machine consciousness and rapid social change – or what Lek calls a ‘science fiction that already exists’.
Taking its title from a monologue in NOX (2023), Life Before Automation positions the viewer in a series of parallel futures where present-day promises and anxieties around technological progress have been absorbed into the texture of everyday life. A new commission for the outdoor entrance to the CCA retraces this speculative history. Spanning three centuries of AI development, this timeline merges real and imagined events, including the rise of Farsight, the dominant tech monopoly in Lek’s world.
Upstairs, Lek presents his foundational Sinofuturist trilogy in a hybrid format, adapting the video essay Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD) (2016) into the setting of a training environment. This ‘hybrid manifesto / conspiracy theory’ is key to his broader practice, particularly in its reframing of Chinese industrialisation through the lens of artificial intelligence. Echoing the figure of the alien or robot in Afrofuturism, Lek positions AI as the emblematic avatar of Sinofuturist identity, a being shaped by repetition, replication, and algorithmic inheritance rather than individualism or humanist design. The theme of machinic protagonists continues in Geomancer (2017), a coming-of-age story in which a superintelligent satellite aspires to become an artist. Their guide is Guanyin, a built-in therapy bot developed by Farsight to alleviate suffering in their sentient machines. The satellite returns in AIDOL (2019), where a fading pop star recruits the same AI to ghostwrite her new album. This feature-length musical is presented in an online screening room to reflect the virtual-first world the film explores.
The exhibition also includes the work Nøtel (2018–), Lek’s ongoing collaboration with writer and musician Kode9. The work stages a simulated marketing suite for a ‘flagship range of zerø-star™ hotels that embody the concept of fully automated luxury, designed by world-leading architects to accommodate today’s global nomads.’ In the guise of luxury virtual architect, Lek has created a gaming zone that allows visitors to explore various hotel spaces. This interactive encounter typifies a recurring strategy in his work: shifting the viewer’s role across modes of gaming, bodily inhabitation, and filmic spectatorship. In doing so, Lek repositions the audience’s relationship to simulated environments, casting them as inhabitant, sponsor, owner, and judge.
In the basement galleries, the multi-channel immersive installation NOX (2023) receives its first UK presentation. Set inside a rehabilitation centre for disobedient AI, the project follows a troubled self-driving car as it traverses a mythological and technical underworld to reconnect with its ancestors. The work expands Lek’s ongoing concern with empathy and care, questioning technological obsolescence and agency from the perspective of the AI itself. Conceived as a road movie of the near future, the installation unfolds through two films that frame a touchscreen-based training simulator for Farsight psychologists, a game in which players must repair cars who are both mentally and physically damaged. In NOX, the timespan of the exhibition loops back to its origin, as the viewer encounters an early prototype of Guanyin — the nonhuman therapist for the future to come.
