Lera Kelemen (b. 1994) is a multimedia artist currently working in London, UK. Her practice revolves around themes related to post-humanism, hybridity, feminism & technology. Her artistic practice focuses on exploring the manifestation of bodies and skin through the integration of partial technologies, culminating in the creation of conceptually immersive environments. In her works, surfaces and textures serve as dynamic mediums for embodiment, with narratives of inhabitation woven into the very fabric of the materials employed.

Lera Kelemen holds an MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art, where she graduated with Distinction. She completed her Fine Arts degree in 2018, and received the Art Encounters Award for her graduation project.

Selected residencies and exhibitions include: Green Skin/Crevice solo show at Borderline Art Space (RO, 2021), I Feel Something, Don’t Know What group show at Zacheta Gallery (PL, 2021), Green Skin/Affective Interstice at Art Encounters (RO, 2021), Kunsthalle Bega residency (RO, 2019), Niki Artist-Run residency (DE, 2020), TM2023 commission (RO, 2020), Staycation group show at Catinca Tăbăcaru Gallery (RO, 2022), If Anything Else Survives at Potential Project (GR, 2021), Royal College of Art grad show (UK, 2022).

In 2022, she published her first artist book featuring a series of installations created between 2019 and 2021.

She presently works from her studio in Central London at Feelium Gallery & Studios, an initiative she co-founded.
corporeus, thirsty
   The Apparatus of Self Constraint
(work in progress)



LERA KELEMEN Selected Works 2019-2021

A self-published artist book comprising of works created by artist Lera Kelemen in her collaborations with different art institutions. This publication is a mile stone in the artist's career, using it as a way to reflect on the formative years of her installation-based practice.


  • Published in June 2022
    Editorial Content LERA KELEMEN
    Design CAMILLE LE FLEM
    Print RAPIDITY, LONDON
    Papers PEREGRINA MAJESTIC & MUNKEN LYNX SMOOTH, G.F. Smith
    Typeface GRANTHA SANGAM MN
    With the kind support of MARK LOCKERY
    Printed copies available upon request

Photos © Camille LeFlem & Lera Kelemen



Green Skin / Affective Interstice
Installation View at Art Encounters Foundation
April 2021

Curators Diana Marincu & Magda Kardasz

Green Skin / Affective Interstice began as a personal exercise to look at the solid surfaces of the built environment from a vulnerable and feminine standpoint. Textures were analysed as areas of mediation of the human, built and natural interactions on a microscopic level. The video work Texture is Identity was screened at Art Encounters Foundation, Zacheta Project Room, Borderline Art Space and Media Art Festival Arad.
Multimedia Installation — Single channel video, stereo sound, 3’03'' / Metal structure / Engraved plaster slabs / Ultra giclée print on Hahnemühle paper / Green luminescent tubes

Photos © Andrei Infinit & Art Encounters / Anna Zagrodzka & Zacheta Gallery

Watch video here

Installation View at Zacheta Project Room


Green Skin / Crevice
Solo Show
Installation View at Boderline Art Space
September 2021

Curated by Cristina Moraru

The installation brings together a compendium of surfaces and structural elements mapped onto the gallery floor to create a network of pathways. A building can be divided into surface and plan. Le Corbusier claims that the surface is what envelopes the mass and that the task of the architect is to ‘vitalise the surfaces which clothe these masses’. In other words the surface is the epidermal layer, the fabric that conveys the identity of a building, and at the same time the facet through which the living, moving world interacts with constructions.
Multimedia Installation — Single channel video, stereo sound, 3’03'' / Metal structures / Digital print on textile / Gravel

Photos © Robert Bouariu & Borderline Art Space



Sensible Realm of Inhabitation
Installation View at Aici Acolo Pop-up Gallery
October 2021

The installation The Sensible Realm of Inhabitation was developed within Middle Grounds and Dissonances, a duo research residency curated by Aici Acolo collective in Cluj-Napoca, summer 2021.

During the residency, the artists made a field trip to the Gorge of Tureni, a narrow pathway between mountains near Cluj-Napoca, Romania. When the mountain’s stone concretions fall off the steep edge, they stack up resembling piles of debris on construction sites. The installation uses imagery from this landscape to highlight how material travels from nature, to constructions, to spaces of intimacy.

The installation uses imagery from this landscape to highlight how material travels from nature, to constructions, to spaces of intimacy.
Multimedia Installation — Sandblasted steel / Engraved plaster slabs / Digital print on textile / Chain

Photos © Aici Acolo


Uncanny Reading Station
Installation View at Atelier35, Bucharest
October 2021


Installation — Metal structure / Photographs / Print on textile

Photos © Club Electroputere



Mark the ground with thin, soft thread
Installation View at Catinca Tăbăcaru Gallery
December 2021

The curtain represents the liminal space that separates two worlds. By covering a window, the curtain becomes a surface that mediates between indoors and outdoors, between the house and the world outside it. A piece of fabric is extracted from a room, then taken out into the woods and stained, soaked and dragged through the mud, then taken back in and integrated into a domestic object such as a blanket, a curtain, a cosy or a quilt.
Installation — Metal structure / Laser cut on ply / Patchwork / Print on textile

Photos © Catalin Georgescu & Catinca Tăbăcaru


Pop-up Device for Experimenting Margins
TM2023
December 2020

The installation reproduces the architectural style of a typical house from the rural area of Banat, Romania, tracing its contour at a 1:1 scale. This abstraction of the shape highlights the house as an archaic document that is slowly disappearing against the backdrop of gentrification and urban development. Arguing that frontiers are abstract notions rather than physical boundaries, the structure creates the premises of a space where inside and outside become relative dimensions. This space invites the audience to reflect on the personal and collective processes that define the private and public spheres and on the way in which people relate to the space of ‘the other’.
Public space installation — Metal structure

Photos © Diana Bilec & Moving Fireplaces



Memonnade
Installation View at Niki Artist Run Space, Zinnober
September 2020

The project analyses ancient signs and techniques of data encoding, comparing them to modern computing processes. The installation draws inspiration from Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory, a sketch  through which the philosopher attempts to visualise the materialisation of human memory via a physical space, and enlarges this structure at a 1:1 scale. This semi-circular structure has eight subdivisions corresponding to the different sections of the Memory Palace.
Multimedia Installation — Wood structure / Digital print on textile / Laser engraving on wood / 2-channel sound

Photos © Ole Blanc & Niki Residency

Click here to listen



Kinaesthetic Cabin
Installation View at Kunsthalle Bega
April 2019

The cabin is made of four detachable pieces which, when assembled, determine the shape of a rectangle. Four speakers are incorporated in the shapes transforming the cabin into a resonant cavity. The audience is invited to read instructions in a small booklet and place themselves in the cabin or move the pieces around, exploring how the sonic image changes accordingly. Inside a closed shape, the body stumbles upon the limitations of the space, as well as of its own physicality. Movement is progressively inhibited as the space becomes populated with objects, either through their position, scale or materiality. These features turn into conventions that dictate, prevent or enable motion.
Multimedia Installation — Quadraphonic sound / Single channel video / Metal structure / Plaster objects / Luminescent tubes / Spray painted MDF boards / Digital print