Lukas van Bentum

Tender Machine explores how images of violence, weaponry, and masculinity circulate, aestheticise, and feel strangely seductive. Drawing from military propaganda, gun magazines, and online imagery, the project collapses the visual distance between firearms and the male body. Through cropped details and tactile surfaces, weapons begin to function like bodies, while bodies acquire the formal qualities of weapons. This slippage exposes the erotic aesthetics through which militarised power is made desirable. Rather than documenting violence itself, the work investigates the visual languages that shape our attraction to force long before violence is physically encountered.

Tender Machine 005 (archival fragment), 2026
Tender Machine
2026 - ongoing

Tender Machine explores how images of violence, weaponry, and masculinity circulate, aestheticise, and feel strangely seductive. Drawing from military propaganda, gun magazines, and online imagery, the project collapses the visual distance between firearms and the male body. Through cropped details and tactile surfaces, weapons begin to function like bodies, while bodies acquire the formal qualities of weapons. This slippage exposes the erotic aesthetics through which militarised power is made desirable. Rather than documenting violence itself, the work investigates the visual languages that shape our attraction to force long before violence is physically encountered.

UNCLASSIFIED 001 (inkjet print on tracing paper), 2026
UNCLASSIFIED
2026 - ongoing

UNCLASSIFIED works with publicly released military imagery printed on unstable materials such as mirror foil and tracing paper. Images produced as evidence are displaced onto surfaces that resist fixed interpretation, exposing the tension between visibility and opacity. The project examines how state-produced imagery performs transparency while simultaneously foreclosing verification, questioning the authority and legibility of procedural images.

The Big Bang (single-channel video), 2026
Tender Machine
2026 - ongoing

Tender Machine explores how images of violence, weaponry, and masculinity circulate, aestheticise, and feel strangely seductive. Drawing from military propaganda, weapons magazines, and online imagery, the project examines how systems of power are not only represented but also desired and consumed. Rather than documenting violence itself, it investigates the visual languages that make militarisation appear aspirational and intimate, asking how images shape our relationship to force long before violence is physically encountered.

Untitled (text fragment), written by Jarred Picket, Rapid City, 2024
Erosion
2025

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Erosion
self-published by Lukas van Bentum
2025

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UNCLASSIFIED 003 (inkjet print on tracing paper), 2026
UNCLASSIFIED
2026 - ongoing

UNCLASSIFIED works with publicly released military imagery printed on unstable materials such as mirror foil and tracing paper. Images produced as evidence are displaced onto surfaces that resist fixed interpretation, exposing the tension between visibility and opacity. The project examines how state-produced imagery performs transparency while simultaneously foreclosing verification, questioning the authority and legibility of procedural images.

Graduationshow, KASK Ghent, 2022
Spectacle
group exhibition

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Tender Machine 005 (archival fragment), 2026
Tender Machine
2026 - ongoing

Tender Machine explores how images of violence, weaponry, and masculinity circulate, aestheticise, and feel strangely seductive. Drawing from military propaganda, gun magazines, and online imagery, the project collapses the visual distance between firearms and the male body. Through cropped details and tactile surfaces, weapons begin to function like bodies, while bodies acquire the formal qualities of weapons. This slippage exposes the erotic aesthetics through which militarised power is made desirable. Rather than documenting violence itself, the work investigates the visual languages that shape our attraction to force long before violence is physically encountered.

(Un)broken, Zwarte Zaal, KASK Ghent, 2022
Spectacle
group exhibition

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Mimosa Savage (aluminium offset printing plate), Omaha, Nebraska, 2025
Erosion
2024

The March (3D printed archival scan), 2023
The March
2023

Big eyes (extract, single-channel video), WIJK8, 2021
Big eyes
group exhibition with Luna Ireland

Big Eyes appropriates publicly accessible webcam streams from public spaces across Belgium to explore contemporary regimes of surveillance, visibility, and public control. By shifting these images into an exhibition context, the work transforms compression artefacts, transmission errors, and pixelated glitches into interruptions of the camera's claim to transparency. Rather than presenting surveillance as an all-seeing system, Big Eyes reveals visibility as mediated, unstable, and inseparable from censorship.

guteaussichten - new German photography, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 2020
Identity Negotiation
group exhibition

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