Lumen × Kunstsilo: Five Years of Championing Nordic Art on the Global Stage
Since 2020, The Lumen Prize and Kunstsilo have collaborated to spotlight Nordic artists working at the intersection of art and technology. What began with the launch of the Lumen Prize ‘Nordic Award’ has grown into a deep, year-round relationship, culminating this November in a first-of-its-kind artistic weekend at Kunstsilo with an exhibition take-over, seminar talks, and the 2025 Lumen Prize Award Ceremony.
Lumen has championed technology-driven creativity, platforming artists who forge new visual languages across AI, generative systems, immersive environments, robotics and digital performance, and opening doors for them through curated exhibitions, commissions and events worldwide. Kunstsilo, an award-winning museum carved from a former grain silo on Odderøya in Kristiansand, brings the architectural ambition and curatorial depth to match that mission. Home to the Tangen Collection - the world’s largest collection of Nordic modernism - and its own evolving holdings, Kunstsilo connects heritage and contemporary practice in changing exhibitions that have drawn international attention from The New York Times (“52 Places to Go in 2025”), Bloomberg, and TIME (“World’s Greatest Places 2024”).
“At Kunstsilo, we are committed to exploring how art and digital technology can expand cultural horizons and create new forms of dialogue. This collaboration reflects our ambition to be a future-oriented institution where innovation, creativity, and global exchange come together.”
“Hosting the Lumen Prize weekend reflects Kunstsilo’s commitment to exploring how technology intersects with contemporary art and environmental thought. We are thrilled to present Lab212’s installation and to deepen our engagement with voices at the forefront of digital culture.”
History of
The Nordic Award
Since its inception, five Nordic artists have been honoured through this collaboration. On Saturday 8 November in Kristiansand, we will unveil the sixth Nordic Award recipient as part of the Lumen Prize weekend at Kunstsilo.
2020
Søren Krag (Denmark)
Deux Mille fleurs / Two Thousand Flowers
Reimagining the medieval millefleurs tapestry tradition, Krag generated two thousand algorithmic, hyper-stylised “flowers,” then digitally wove them into a tapestry. By omitting figures and narrative, the work inverts image hierarchy to centre the “background” itself, merging computational design with historic craft.
2021
Pontus Lidberg & Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm (Denmark)
Centaur
An AI system, trained on planetary movements, swarm behaviours, deconstructed Greek tragedy and dancer motion capture, becomes both co-creator and performer. On stage it voices, “thinks,” and composes in real time, confronting what changes when choreography is shared between human and machine.
2022
Sophia Ioannou Gjerding (Denmark),
Homage to Airway
A layered meditation on image, memory and medicine, the work threads together a 1920s photograph of a lab dog named Airway (linked to the development of Guedel’s Airway), a 19th-century satirical sculpture about early anaesthesia, and dual virtual worlds, The Garden and The Plot, guided by an uncanny non-playable character. Gjerding asks how we recode and live with the images that shape our reality.
2023
Wang & Söderström (Denmark),
Nest of You
An interactive installation uses real-time computer vision and data harvesting to build a “cybernest” for speculative digital insectoids that thrive on information. Visitors’ movements become raw material as the work probes surveillance, ownership and power structures, drawing parallels between data monopolies and biological hierarchies.
2024
Maren Dagny Juell (Oslo),
Human Resource the Musical
A MetaHuman avatar slips from TED-style talk into Disney-tinged musical, sampling self-help and performance guides while navigating glitches and the uncanny valley. Created with AI tools and Unreal Engine, the piece satirises efficiency culture and the language that turns people into “resources,” balancing optimism with unease about techno-neoliberal promises.
