Image: Andrew Walter Boggins
Weird Hope Engines
Curated by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe
Exhibition: Sat 22 Mar 2025 - Sat 10 May 2025
Opening Friday 21st March 6-8pm
Bonington Gallery
Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, Nottingham, NG1 4GG
United Kingdom
press release
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.
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 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 with Patrick Stuart, 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.
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.
LINK: Weird Hope Engines
