LUmkA is pleased to present Ruby Chen at Minor Attractions: 2026 in conjunction with her first solo exhibition, EVENT-0 Manual Override, London, UK. From 13 - 17 October 2026, the artist presents a series of new works ranging from painting to sculpture.

Chen, a multidisciplinary artist focusing primarily on sculpture, installation, and painting, explores how the archive is a place of power, in both preservation and erasure. Materially driven, featured work Archive Fever, uses the aesthetic symbology of the Japanese Torii Gate to cultivate a metal table that resembles a sacrificial altar. Resting atop the altar is a kinetic figure reminiscent of an animal skeleton, performing an endless gesture of digging into its own discarded skin.

Drawing on the Torii Gate’s connotation as a gateway to another realm, Chen bridges the archive’s meaning as a “place of power and control” to reference erasure in which memory is sacrificed and regulated for the sake of the archive. For Jacques Derrida, the archive is more than a container for memory, but a space of authority and institution. The Greek origin of archive, arkhē, means both “beginning” and “command,” alluding to a method of selecting and interpreting transformational knowledge.

Drawing on Derrida’s Archive Fever, the work attempts to embody humanity’s restless compulsion to uncover its central and seemingly encrypted “truth” -- even in the face of its own destruction or the erasure of what it was working to preserve. In the words of Chen, “As data and machinery become increasingly similar to biological memory, the sculpture positions the archive as a haunted system: one that claws at and threatens its own remains, repeating history under the promise of industrial progress, while never fully escaping the structures that bind it to the past.”

Above the sculpture, Chen’s painting, Crush, 2026 depicts a body contorting and mutating to resemble and assimilate to the technological systems that organize and control it. Between the two works Chen asserts a n0tion of the past, present, and future of humanity’s precarious relationship with curiosity, invention, and technological progression.

LUmkA is pleased to present Ruby Chen’s first solo exhibition in London, UK, EVENT-0 Manual Override. The artist presents a series of new works that investigate humanity’s compulsion toward technologization and invention. To celebrate, please join us for an opening reception on 12 September 2026 at 96 Robert Street, NW1 3Qp from 18:00 – 21:00.

Staging a tableau of sculpture, sound, and installation, EVENT-0 Manual Override renders a potential future; an ecosystem grown from the ruins of 21st-century technological infrastructures. From forms reminiscent of CERN’s particle accelerator to seats and machine parts of abandoned high-speed vehicles, Chen questions humanity's progression with technology and its potential downfalls.

Inspired by the burden of human curiosity, the artist probes mankind’s carnal desire to trace our beginning and streamline our future. EVENT-0 Manual Override questions how technological systems progressively organize human perception and optimize behaviour through logics of speed and efficiency or order.

Immersed in the subterranean installation, Chen’s works present human compulsion’s ability to seep into technological networks, posing that the systems are innately haunted by the very bodies they attempt to optimize. This haunting, seen through corporeal overgrowth in the form of moss-like hair accumulations, persists as contamination, revealing the human subconscious’s capacity to interrupt technology’s seemingly closed systems. No matter how threatening, standardized, or efficient the technological systems become, EVENT-0 Manual Override highlights how the anthropomorphic poetics of humanity and its compulsion, embedded and encoded, seep through.

LUmkA is pleased to present Privacy Index, the gallery's inaugural exhibition in London following its recent relocation from New York City. Presented in collaboration with Big Brother Watch, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and No2ID, the exhibition will be on view from 19 March to 11 April 2026, with an opening reception from 18:00-21:00 featuring a performance by LINX on 19 March.

Privacy Index tracks the ontological evolution of surveillance from lens-based observation to its contemporary form. The body itself has become a site of continuous data extraction. Advanced machine vision systems—biometric, cellular, virtual, lens-based—transform the corporeal form into an unwitting data mine, extracting a wealth of information from our facial expressions, gait, hesitations, and microexpressions. This intimate bodily data, harvested and housed in remote server farms, molds the very lens through which we perceive and navigate lived reality.

Featuring Ruby Chen, Nicholas Cheveldave, James Hoff, Miles Scharff, Linx Peng, and Ivo Nagel, Privacy Index collectively interrogates how contemporary regimes of visibility have recalibrated subjectivity and agency in the twenty-first century. Drawing on Foucault's theory of the Panopticon—wherein power operates through internalized observation—Privacy Index examines how surveillance modulates our performances of selfhood and conformity within social norms and expectations.

While privacy has become an urgent public concern, it remains poorly grasped as both a concept and a living practice. Privacy Index arrives as a timely interrogation of surveillance capitalism that insists art's power to provoke consciousness and enable resistance. The exhibition asks viewers to recognize practices of self-regulation and consider what refusal might look like now that visibility is obligatory. Privacy Index stages a tableau of interventions by artists who not only organize a mirror reflecting and exposing the condition, but also suggest self-representation through encryption.

Exhibition note: To exercise Privacy Index’s rejection of data mining, the gallery will not be circulating images of the artwork and installation on media platforms. It is up to the audience whether they choose to decide the same.

LUmkA is pleased to present selected works by gallery artists Ruby Chen and Miles Scharff.

Chen, informed by evolutionary cosmologies and cybernetic theory, stages a bifurcated tableau: a lone figure gazing upon a passenger-less motorcycle. The juxtaposing images crystallize the estrangement between the body and the machine, illustrating how power and agency migrate seamlessly from the corporeal form to the apparatus. Chen’s work raises the question of whether technology remains a prosthetic extension of the mortal form or, having crossed an ontological threshold, now operates independently under its own autonomous desire.

Scharff, a sound artist with an education in physics, invents, records, and stages interactions between tangible objects and intangible signals. In his latest work, footage of a UFO plays across a screen while a field of steel dust—animated by magnetism—traces its movement. The artist’s apparatus converts invisible force into visible index, re-encoding perception through delay and distortion. Magnetism functions here as both medium and interference, an unseen pressure that reveals even as it conceals. The UFO emerges less as a stable image than as a site of mediation, oscillating between presence and concealment, shaped not by what it is but by the forces that render it perceptible. The work ultimately asks what it means to see when every act of seeing is already conditioned by what cannot be seen itself.

Through Chen’s tensile imagery and Scharff’s translated vibrations, both artists anthropomorphize technology and technologize the body, revealing the boundary between human and machine as a permeable, shifting membrane.

LUmkA is pleased to present As It Turns Quiet, We Rot, a collaboration by Ruby Chen and Linx Peng on view from 8 to 14 August 2025 at 33ml Offspace, Shanghai, China.

“In the information age, an attitude of human evolution and refinement past our history books is disseminated. Genocides and land wars, a barbarism we agreed to outgrow, are live streamed to reveal the falsity of evolution.

Perhaps we never surpassed the medieval dark age.

Technofeudalism, as theorized by Yanis Varoufakis, parallels medieval feudalism to big tech’s control of the metaverse. We (the serfs) are bound to their platforms and offer the entirety of our digital information as currency. This process of data mining further instills the techno-oligarchs’ position.

Neophilia, a fetishistic obsession for the novel, drives a façade of technological breakthroughs and human advancements. These ‘inventions’ organize a masquerade of reform and evolution. With this attitude, the populace distances itself from our past as if to negate shame and honor for those persecuted. Such detachment prevents one from engaging with the root of the problem– our generational traumas and compulsions we need to unravel and unlearn.

Our collective dissociation and death drive propels the repetition of history.”

- Ruby Chen

Through sculpture and sound, Chen and Peng explore the performance of innovation and its inability to suppress primal impulses. In observing digital serfdom’s modernizing of dark age labor practices, the artists position a parallel between the convention of newness and corporate confinement. Entangling their practices, an organization of the animate and inanimate highlights the exploration of the subconscious as a means to unlearn perspectives instilled by the false structure of “human evolution.”

LUmkA is pleased to present The Theatre at 158 Rivington Street, NYC, NY, on view from 3 to 30 May 2025. Please join us for an opening reception on 3 May 2025 from 6 - 8 PM.

The Theatre houses environmental installations by Anna Ting Möller, Luca Rekosh, Marianna Rothen, and Miles Scharff to disrupt the consumer mind and propose a more authentic mode of being. Opposing qualitative and quantitative reasoning, sensory perception, memory, and physical and immaterial realities organize the experiential model of exhibition.

In a late-capitalist society that validates existence through perpetual consumption, we lose sight of the fact that reality is largely immaterial at its atomic level. Meanwhile, consumption becomes data, feeding algorithmic systems that target the unconscious mind—awakening desire like a sleeper agent. These subliminal cues amplify consumer longing, reinforcing a positive feedback loop that commodifies even the most intimate practices and distances us from embodied experience.

In the ruins of a hype beast retailer, a mélange of mannequins, animism, and electromagnetic field interpretations becomes The Theatre. Through sensory-based interventions, the exhibition disrupts this addictive compulsion toward materialism, proposing an invitation to return to presence, perception, and the reality of lived experience.

​​​

Organized in collaboration with Mila Rae Mancuso as LUmkA's last New York City exhibition before moving to London, UK (Fall 2025)

LUmkA is pleased to present The Cult of Domesticity, a group presentation showcasing the work of Ilayda Çelik, Ruby Chen, Nuri Patricia, and Eden Taff. Opening 19 October 2024, the exhibition, installed site-specifically to a bedroom, is accessible only by appointment.

The American home, a construct of gender and family, was bred in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. As men left the house, women were left idle. To remedy such a hysteric case, Victorian society organized women’s roles into “The Cult of Domesticity.” This ethos of “True Womanhood,” served as a guide for the white and wealthy, encouraging piety, purity, submission, and domesticity. Isolating the majority from achieving such societal standards, “The Cult of Domesticity” attempted to preserve and perform white patriarchal power.

Yet, behind closed doors, a community and practice of mutual aid was formed. Women’s magazines carefully published articles that promoted feminist and emancipationist doctrines. Through print and needlework circles, this privatized sphere evolved into a refuge for reclamation and subversion. Absent from man’s surveilling eyes, the home organized a space that propelled the Women's Suffrage and Abolitionist movements.

Adolescent and adult American uterine bodies were born with more rights than today. Trending archetypes such as "Trad Wives" and "Soft Girl Living” are propelled by mass media, resurfacing ideas reminiscent of “The Cult of Domesticity.” State by state, bodily autonomy and gender-affirmation procedures are becoming increasingly inaccessible. Political representatives with no medical experience are now qualified to determine the fate of each uterine and feminine body. The condition of choice and self-determination is furthermore endangered.

Exploring what blossoms in a privatized space, The Cult of Domesticity presents works exploring gender identity and femininity through subversive practices. The exhibition uses the bedroom walls to inspire redefinition and reverence towards the uterine and feminine experiences.

LUmkA is thrilled to announce our participation in NADA: Assembly curated by Katie A. Pfohl. “This NADA Curated online exhibition includes twenty-five artists who reflect on assembly’s deep roots in art history and connection to vanguard political thought. At a moment when our ability to assemble is being tested globally, these artists help us envision new ways of coming together, of holding multiple truths, and of finding unexpected sources of connection. These artists show us that assembly—paradoxically—often requires disassembly: old ideas, materials, and concepts, reassembled into something new. Through their art, they rethink the logic of industry and capitalism, reconstruct a renewed relationship to community and ancestry, and reconsider our connection to land and the environment. Drawing together a global range of artists, this online exhibition spans many different geographies and contexts to itself function as a kind of assembly: a gathering of artistic voices to help guide our future thinking. As we face a moment of great political, ideological, and social division, these artistic explorations of the notion of assembly—from the factory line to the protest line—give shape to our next moves.“ - NADA

Now, more than ever, the notion of agency in media participation is illusory. In the words of Guy Debord, “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.” The Age of Information has organized a model of hyper accessible consumption of said image. Spectacle, as it operates in today’s image-based culture, propagates an entitlement to view, consume, have access to, and excess of. This positive feedback loop alters the collective subconscious and brings about the normalization of (and desensitization to) voyeurism.

In response, LUmkA invites three artists of varying disciplines to contribute site-specific work to its unconventional basement setting. The space, only accessible by ladder, hinders and interrupts the gaze as an effort to question consumption and commodification.

Observed singularly, the exhibition asks each viewer to contemplate and challenge their own subconscious voyeuristic tendencies. Each artist’s experimental and multi-sensory language complicates the relationship between viewer and viewed, while exploring themes of surveillance, subjectivity, and accessibility. Refusing immediacy of consumption, Basement Workshop Series stages an intervention for intentional and self-aware perception.

LUCA REKOSH: Disjecta Membra at the Lido

With an interdisciplinary approach, Luca Rekosh will construct an environmental installation primarily of construction materials to expose, reference, and abstract the history of narrative and memory manipulation. Rekosh creates a paradoxical space to tremble where one is prompted to question the difference between manufactured and truth.

LUmkA is pleased to present its second exhibition, Basement Workshop Series, at 207 Clinton Street, NYC, NY. Opening 18 April the exhibition will present a rotation of three installations by Ashley Condina, Lucy Tarquinio, and Luca Rekosh. Please join us for the opening reception of each installation, 18 April, 24 April, and 9 May 2024 from 7 - 9 PM.

Now, more than ever, the notion of agency in media participation is illusory. In the words of Guy Debord, “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.” The Age of Information has organized a model of hyper accessible consumption of said image. Spectacle, as it operates in today’s image-based culture, propagates an entitlement to view, consume, have access to, and excess of. This positive feedback loop alters the collective subconscious and brings about the normalization of (and desensitization to) voyeurism.

In response, LUmkA invites three artists of varying disciplines to contribute site-specific work to its unconventional basement setting. The space, only accessible by ladder, hinders and interrupts the gaze as an effort to question consumption and commodification.

Observed singularly, the exhibition asks each viewer to contemplate and challenge their own subconscious voyeuristic tendencies. Each artist’s experimental and multi-sensory language complicates the relationship between viewer and viewed, while exploring themes of surveillance, subjectivity, and accessibility. Refusing immediacy of consumption, Basement Workshop Series stages an intervention for intentional and self-aware perception.

Lucy Tarquinio: Trendkill

Beaconing from the darkness, fragments of words, objects, and memories intersect. Tethering language, representation, and abstraction, the line communicates an optical system of layers– an organized chaos of process. Exuding an aura of play and humor, the spotlighted paintings emphasize the process of processing, the process of painting, the process of committing into memory. Realizing her reality, Tarquinio’s elusive practice is rooted in the rigor of formalism, yet invites the intervention of absurd photo-material when the process becomes too systematic.

Hanging as tangible memories, Tarquinio’s innermost thoughts and experiences communicate through the breath of abstraction. Cheekily liaising with the viewer’s eye, this accumulation of studio choreographies manifest into an illegible language. Protected, the arranged layers form a shroud, and persist against the eye of the Spectacle. Subverting hyper visibility innate to painting, Tarquinio concocts a visual rabbit hole. Upon observation, the image-trained eye desperately bounces up and down, back and forth and, between layers searching for representational values– the more immersed, the more lost.

Now, more than ever, the notion of agency in media participation is illusory. In the words of Guy Debord, “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.” The Age of Information has organized a model of hyper accessible consumption of said image. Spectacle, as it operates in today’s image-based culture, propagates an entitlement to view, consume, have access to, and excess of. This positive feedback loop alters the collective subconscious and brings about the normalization of (and desensitization to) voyeurism.

In response, LUmkA invites three artists of varying disciplines to contribute site-specific work to its unconventional basement setting. The space, only accessible by ladder, hinders and interrupts the gaze as an effort to question consumption and commodification.

Observed singularly, the exhibition asks each viewer to contemplate and challenge their own subconscious voyeuristic tendencies. Each artist’s experimental and multi-sensory language complicates the relationship between viewer and viewed, while exploring themes of surveillance, subjectivity, and accessibility. Refusing immediacy of consumption, Basement Workshop Series stages an intervention for intentional and self-aware perception.

ASHLEY CONDINA: Crypt

Concerned with the dichotomy between the preserved and the omitted, Condina documents her daily choreographies to question notions of linearity, consent, and privacy. The artist analyzes documentation and conservation as political acts, using symbolism and mythology to organize an environmental installation with lapses in conventions of time. Condina transforms the gallery space into a tableau of personal symbolism. Video performance and multimedia sculptures organize a language of cultural touchstones and communicate the innate voyeurism and passive consumption of our culture. Emphasizing the artist’s own lineage, the exhibition serves as both a self portrait and a mirror to how one is remembered and perceived.

LUmkA is pleased to present SKIN/IN SITU, an exhibition curated by Cortney Connolly. On view 2 - 4 December 2023, the Gallery’s inaugural exhibition will feature environmental performance, Environment 001. Please join us 2 December 2023 from 7 - 9 P.M. for an opening reception and live demonstration.

Dancing in the gray area between active and passive sexual expression, SKIN/IN SITU examines the cycle of endangerment applied to the performance of female sexuality. In the environmental installation, humanesque vessels dressed in cut assemblages of lingerie are activated and altered through ritualistic gestures and choreographies. SKIN/IN SITU edges sensory stimulation to inquire and provoke meditation on the dynamics between expression and audience.

Employing themes of deviance and obscenity, the performance informed by abstract calcified stretched compositions and their projected dancing figurative sisters, build an environment for audience activation. Whether absent, abstracted, or embodied, the sensuality of each medium arouses reflection to the collective’s conscious consumption. Inspired by Judith Butler’s theory of performative acts, the intermedia conversation explores the audience’s responsibility for the dymanics of a safe space of sexual expression.