Weird Hope Engines / Bonington Gallery, Nottingham
Opening Friday 21st March
6-8pm
Exhibition: Sat 22 Mar 2025 - Sat 10 May 2025
Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, Nottingham, NG1 4GG
Weird Hope Engines embraces the culture of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) to explore play as a site of projection, simulation, communal myth-making, distorted temporality, and alternate possibility. The first exhibition of its kind, it foregrounds the practices of innovative designers, artists, and writers in the field of independent game design, and brings their work into dialogue with fellow-travellers in the field of critical art practice.
Curated by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe together as Dying Earth Catalogue.
Image: Andrew Walter, courtesy the artist.
Weird Hope Engines, curated by Dying Earth Catalogue, is an experimental exhibition that reimagines Bonington Gallery as a hybrid lab—at once a testing site for the development of new worlding experiences, an active gaming hub, and an archive of maps, concept artworks, rulebooks, and gaming curiosities. Visitors will be invited to participate in both solo and collaborative gaming experiences that foreground questions of collective responsibility, personal testimony, and colonial legacy, reframing our expectations of gaming imaginaries as potent sites for rethinking social organisation, cross-cultural understanding, and personal reverie.
Migrating between the dreamworlds of science fiction, fantasy, folkloric myth, and pressing social realities, a series of newly commissioned play experiences designed by David Blandy, Chris Bissette, Laurie O’Connel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko will utilise a range of mechanics—from dice rolls and diary keeping, to votive offerings and the redaction of personal documents—to encourage new approaches to critical play.
Original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K. Kemp and Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang (Melsonia Arts Council) will showcase the unique function of visual art within gaming imaginaries, where image making moves beyond functional illustration into complex relationships with collaborative storytelling.
An essay-film devised by the curators and based upon Jamie Sutcliffe’s essay ‘Playing Games’ (Art Monthly, Issue 484, March 2025) has been produced in collaboration with Adam Sinclair and Lotti Closs, exploring the shared experience of game space as a conflicted site of simulation and hallucinatory possibility.
Angela Washko's project "The Council is in Session" was funded in part by The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) at University of Michigan and Stamps School of Art & Design's Catalyst Fund for Faculty Research and Innovation.
Bonington Gallery
Nottingham Trent University
Dryden Street
Nottingham
NG1 4GG
Images: Graphic identity by Alfred Valley
ArtReview March Issue 2025, preview by Chris Fite-Wassilak