BIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
Castell Lanko (b.1998) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Cairo, working across sound, new media, film, tattooing, and performance. Her work examines the relationship between virtual environments, identity, trauma, and perception, often navigating the space between the grotesque and the intimate.
In the last two years, her focus has shifted toward noise music and sound performance, under both her name and the alias Sysdoll, which represents the more intense, emotional, and experimental side of her practice, blending harsh noise, industrial sound, and performance-based elements that confront themes of dissociation, psychological rupture, and emotional overload.
A core part of her work involves building digital worlds populated by fictional characters and mythologies. These spaces function as personal archives, layered with references to lived experience, memory, and emotional states. Castell’s visual and sonic language often explores themes like masochism, disembodiment, and trauma, using nightmarish imagery and harsh sound to reflect psychological intensity.
She is the founder of Mutual Damage, a newly formed decentralized collective and label for experimental sound and performance. It functions as a collaborative network of musicians, artists, and researchers, existing as an open platform for raw, unconventional creative practices and dissenting perspectives.
Castell has exhibited and performed internationally in Cairo, Guadeloupe, Wrocław, Amman, Paris, Genova, Bratislava, Barreiro, Zagreb, and Catania. Her awards include the Goethe-Institut Project Fund (2020), Roznama 8’s French Institute Prize (2021), and 1st Prize for the CLIMAX Project at Cri de Femmes Festival (2021).
ARTIST STATEMENT
Virtual space, self-consciousness, sonic ontology, and the erotic theory of beauty and ugliness are central themes in my work. I see virtual space as a place where “nature” can be redefined, elements reconstructed, repositioned, and reinterpreted. It offers endless possibilities and makes the unreal tangible. My practice questions self-consciousness not as something confined to the body, but as something that arises through external interaction, coexistence, rather than interiority.
Rooted in conceptual art, my work spans music, digital media, drawing, video, and installation. It often takes the form of narratives exploring contemporary culture and the instability of identity. I construct detached worlds inhabited by fictional characters, nonexistent beings who guide the trajectory of each project. In recent years, noise music and live performance have become a major focus. This work is raw, loud, and physical, allowing me to express what images alone cannot.
My ideas around beauty and ugliness were shaped by growing up in the darker, anonymous spaces of the internet, environments that embraced discomfort, distortion, and difference. These experiences challenged dominant aesthetics and taught me to find beauty in what’s often seen as disturbing or unwanted. My work resists surface-level aesthetics in favor of immersive, experiential environments.
There is something deeply human in art that disturbs. It challenges the viewer while offering emotional power and strange tenderness. This shaped how I viewed myself and led me to question how identity is constructed, marginalized, and regulated. Whether I’m building a digital world or performing live sound, I treat each work as a container for emotional intensity. My process is intuitive, often centered around imagined spaces or fictional characters that help me express something internal. Regardless of medium, my work is connected by recurring themes and tone, each project shaped by research, experimentation, and lived experience, evolving naturally into the next. I see my practice as ongoing, shifting, and open-ended.
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