Artists Film Club: Lawrence Lek

This screening features the first UK showing of London-based artist Lawrence Lek's Pyramid Schemes (2018), alongside recent works Geomancer (2017) and Play Station (2017). The screening is accompanied by a remote conversation with the artist in a discussion about the videos included in the programme.  

Working with gaming environments and game design software, Lek constructs dystopian future worlds occupied by new and emerging technologies. In Pyramid Schemes, Lek returns to the subject of architecture, a focus of earlier works, to unpick its social and political history and implications, hinging on London's Shard designed by architect Renzo Piano.  

Play Station (Farsight Corporate Trailer), a promotional short for a fictitious company, imagines a future of AI and outsourced labour beyond the gig economy in this tongue-in-check computer animated utopia. In Geomancer, set in 2065, the eve of Singapore's centennial celebrations, Lek leads the viewer through interior and exterior gaming environments, mediating on the future of the island city-state. Seen through the East/West political axis, the role of technologies and shifting global power structures reveals both hope and despair for the future.  

Programme

• Pyramid Schemes, 2018, HD video, colour, sound, 17 minutes
• Play Station (Farsight Corporate Trailer), 2017, HD video, sound, 5 minutes 5 seconds
• Geomancer, 2017, HD video, colour, sound, 48 minutes 51 seconds  

Lawrence Lek was born in 1982 and lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include Rendered Cities, ApexArt, New York (2018), Art Night London (2017), Neither one thing or another, Jerwood Space, London (2017), HyperPavilion, Venice Biennale (2017) and Glasgow International (2016). Lek received the 2017 Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Award, and the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award.