BIO
Lenka Morávková is a Czech-born, Los Angeles–based transmedia artist, composer and performer working across sound, performance, installation and moving image.
Her practice moves between experimental music and contemporary art, often using glass, technology, the body and site-specific environments as both material and symbolic systems. She is the creator of the Bohemian Cristal Instrument, a one of a kind acoustic sound sculpture from glass based on legendary Cristal Baschet that has become central to her performance and sound practice.
Morávková’s work has been presented internationally across museums, festivals and interdisciplinary platforms, including The Broad, ISEA (International Symposium of Digital Arts), Burning Man, Eurosonic, Lightning in a Bottle and TEDx, spanning contexts from experimental music and performance to immersive and new media art.
Her artistic practice is informed by an extensive academic background in social anthropology, ethnomusicology and digital culture. She conducted graduate research at Charles University and UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music before pursuing doctoral studies in Ethnomusicology and Digital Composition at UC Riverside. Her research explored ritual, music and subcultures, participation, technology, power and cultural transformation — concerns that continue to inform her artistic work.
ARTISTIC PRACTICE
Morávková’s practice explores the shifting boundaries between human, technological and natural worlds, and the systems of meaning, power and belief through which we attempt to understand and control them.
Rooted in sound and expanded through performance, moving image and installation, her work frequently transforms glass, technology, the body and landscape into instruments, environments and ritual objects. Sound operates not only as composition, but as a physical and spatial force — capable of activating materials, bodies and altered states of perception.
A recurring element of her practice is ritual, transformation and subversion. She is drawn to liminal moments when familiar systems begin to break down — when technology fails, environments become unstable, identities dissolve, or established hierarchies lose their authority. Rather than treating collapse solely as an endpoint, she approaches it as a threshold through which new relationships and forms can emerge.
Her work often uses subversion, absurdity and dark humor to destabilize systems that otherwise appear fixed or authoritative. Technologies are misused, broken or turned against their intended purpose; familiar objects acquire unexpected agency; destruction can become celebratory, and serious social or ecological questions coexist with playfulness and provocation.
Her work carries a subtle undercurrent of mysticism without explicit religious symbolism. She is interested in the invisible structures connecting seemingly opposing systems: organic and technological, ancient and futuristic, physical and digital, rational and intuitive. Mysticism surfaces through resonance, repetition, code, elemental forces and encounters between human and more-than-human forms of agency.
This inquiry runs through her works including Bohemian Cristal Instrument, Glass Spilled Out From THe Broken Bathtub, This Is Not A Pleasant Sound, Collapsoscape, When The Waves Become Walls, New Nature and the ongoing My Home My Torture series. Across them, machines acquire vulnerability, glass becomes sonic and bodily, landscapes act as agents rather than backgrounds, and the boundaries between human, material and environment become increasingly unstable.
At the center of Morávková’s practice is a recurring question:
What happens when the systems we rely on — technological, environmental, social or personal — stop behaving as we expect?
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