Our Ghosts, Our Shells, 2025; David Blandy and Petra Szemán

Our Ghosts Our Shells, 2025 , David Blandy and Petra Szemán, made with the support of Arts Council England

In their collaborative interactive game Our Ghosts, Our Shells, Blandy and Szemán share layered references to games of their youth, nostalgic artefacts and anime inspirations in a pixelated landscape of memory. Lucid game structures, immersive storytelling, and nonlinear narratives allow the works to invite a navigation into speculative futures and alternate pathways of existence. Blandy and Szemán work within the realms of identity and selfhood, reality and simulation. This works builds on their previous exhibition, Alternate Presence at Seventeen.

Exhibition schedule: Seventeen, London; FACT Liverpool & Two Queens, Leicester
Curated/Produced by Rebecca Edwards

Installation view: Installation view: Our Ghosts Our Shells (Endgame), 2025 , David Blandy and Petra Szemán, Two Queens, Leicester

Installation view: Installation view: Our Ghosts Our Shells (Enhanced), 2025 , David Blandy and Petra Szemán,FACT, Liverpool, 2025

David Blandy is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas that range from ecology, history and science to arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives; Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. He builds complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence,  through visual poetry and immersive play. 

Petra Szemán is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. Their practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary line separating real and fictional, and the kind of lives and experiences that are possible there. Using a virtual version of themself as a protagonist journeying through animatic realms, they explore liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction (both on- and off-screen). Turning away from thinking of the cyberspace as a radically ’other’ realm, Petra hopes to walk the line situated between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons. 

Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, new forms of cultural production and artistic development, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture. https://rebeccaedwards.xyz/