Martha Kicsiny: Light, Power, and the Material Weight of the Cloud

When light stops being immaterial

Martha Kicsiny is a British-Hungarian visual artist based in Ghent, Belgium. Working across drawing, installation and 3D-printed lithophanes, her practice operates at the intersection of historical media technologies and contemporary digital culture. Rather than treating the digital as an abstract or immaterial realm, Kicsiny insists on its physical, political and ecological consequences.

Like a fishing net stretching across our skies, it is uncertain whether we are the users or the bait of the internet - Martha Kicsiny

Her work is grounded in research into 19th-century visual techniques, particularly lithophanes as early light-based mass media. By translating her digital drawings into backlit, three-dimensional objects, she turns light itself into a carrier of meaning, belief and control. Screens, nets, enclosures and architectural fragments recur as structural motifs, linking historical forms of power to today’s algorithmic infrastructures.

Martha Kicsiny: Studio view. Photo by Péter Tamás Sági. Image courtesy the artist and photographer.Martha Kicsiny: Studio interior with drawings and light-based works. Photo by Péter Tamás Sági. Image courtesy the artist and photographer.Martha Kicsiny: Studio detail with architectural motifs and lithophane works. Photo by Péter Tamás Sági. Image courtesy the artist and photographer.

Across recent series such as Field Disturbance, Consequences and Celestial Domain, Kicsiny addresses technofeudalism not as theory but as lived condition

The internet appears less as a neutral tool than as a system of extraction, binding users through invisible yet material dependencies. Light becomes both promise and warning: seductive, illuminating, and complicit.

Martha Kicsiny: Studio view with illuminated lithophane sculpture. Photo by Péter Tamás Sági. Image courtesy the artist and photographer.

Her work does not argue for withdrawal, nor does it offer resolution. Instead, it stages moments of friction, where belief, agency and responsibility remain unstable, and where the cost of digital convenience becomes briefly, uncomfortably visible.

Martha Kicsiny on Instagram

Martha Kicsiny Artworks and Exhibiton Views:

Martha Kicsiny: Consequences Triptych, 2025. Photo by Réka Hegyháti. Image courtesy the artist and photographer.

Martha Kicsiny: Field Fallow (left) and Domain Schism (right), 2025. Backlit lithophane sculptures. Image courtesy the artist.

Martha Kicsiny: Freedom to Fall (left) and Escape to Weave (right). Photo by Dávid Bíró. Image courtesy the artist and photographer.

Martha Kicsiny: Freedom Evaporates. Photo by Dávid Bíró. Image courtesy the artist and photographer.Martha Kicsiny: “Critical Mass.” Photo by Dávid Bíró. Image courtesy the artist and photographer.Martha Kicsiny: Consequences II. Photo by Réka Hegyháti. Image courtesy the artist and photographer.