Weird Hope Engines / Bonington Gallery, Nottingham
Preview evening Fri 21 Mar 2025 / 6-8pm
Exhibition open: Sat 22 Mar 2025 - Sat 10 May 2025
6:00pm - 8:00pm / Monday – Friday, 10am– 5pm / Saturday, 11am – 3pm
New commissions by Angela Washko, Chris Bisette, Zedeck Siew, Laurie O’Connel, David Blandy.
Artist Focus: Shuyi Zhang & Andrew Walter, Amanda Lee Franck, Scrap Princess, Tom K. Kemp.
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 highlights 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, this experimental exhibition reimagines Bonington Gallery as a hybrid lab – 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 are invited to participate in both solo and collaborative gaming experiences that highlight 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.
Image: Andrew Walter, courtesy the artist.
Migrating between the dreamworlds of science fiction, fantasy, folkloric myth, and pressing social realities, a series of newly commissioned play experiences by David Blandy, Chris Bisette, Laurie O’Connel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko utilise a range of mechanics, from dice rolls and diary keeping to tumble towers and the recording of personal anecdotes, to encourage new approaches to immersive play.
Original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K. Kemp, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang (Melsonia Arts Council) showcase the unique function of visual art within gaming imaginaries, in which image making moves beyond functional illustration into complex relationships with collaborative storytelling. Archival vitrines illustrate Nottingham’s essential role in the development of gaming history.
An original essay-film by the curators, produced in collaboration with Adam Sinclair and Lotti Closs, explores the shared experience of game space as a site of hallucinatory possibility.
Bonington Gallery
Nottingham Trent University
Dryden Street
Nottingham
NG1 4GG
Images: Graphic identity by Alfred Valley