Born in Bydgoszcz (PL), Lukas Zerbst lives and works between Germany and Liechtenstein. He worked for several years in theatre productions at venues including Volksbühne Berlin, Fillmore Miami, FL and AURA in Kaunas, LT. Coming from performance and dance theatre, his practice has since shifted towards site-specific interventions, installations and technically complex situations in which bodies, spaces, machines and institutional routines become mutually dependent.
Zerbst’s work usually begins with what a place already offers: infrastructure, interiors, architecture, technical systems, routines and expectations. Rather than confronting these orders from the outside, he enters them with suspicious precision. His interventions often appear at first as repairs, maintenance, damage, technical solutions or functional misunderstandings. Only gradually does it become clear that an existing logic has begun to tip. Devices, motors and automated processes frequently act as performers in his work: they fulfil a given function so precisely that its absurdity, brutality or comedy becomes visible. In this sense, technology is never merely a tool or demonstration of skill, but a way of making social, institutional and spatial scripts speak about themselves. Once, his work was aptly described as a “therapy session with the institution.”
His works ask how people live, work, reside, act and become visible under given conditions. Bureaucracies, platforms, institutions and architectures appear not as abstract systems, but as concrete situations: a like becomes labour, a delivery becomes a physical encounter, a door becomes a choreography of power, a knock becomes an uncertain question of belonging. Informed by experiences of migration, adaptation and improvisation, his practice often deals with camouflage, repair, appropriation and repurposing — not only as formal strategies, but as social knowledge. Power appears in his work less as a grand drama than as routine, service, interface or polite gesture. He is not interested in states of emergency, but in the uncanniness of normal operations.
Zerbst is a fellow of the Junge Akademie at Akademie der Künste, Berlin. He was awarded the Villa Serpentara residency in Olevano Romano, in close connection with Villa Massimo. In 2020, he was a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. He was shortlisted for Delfina Foundation, London, in 2024 and selected as a finalist for the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium in 2025. Among others, he received the Prize of Kunstverein Hannover, the GWK-Förderpreis and the Bremer Förderpreis. His work has received support from institutions including the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, the Goethe-Institut, Institut français and DAAD.