Many Ghosts, Many Shells
Seventeen
1st – 31st May 2025
PV 1st May 6pm
270-276 Kingsland RoadLondonE8 4DG
t. +44(0) 207 249 7789
press release
Many Ghosts, Many Shells debuts new collaborative work by Petra Szemán and David Blandy, in parallel with other artists working in the realms of identity and selfhood, reality and simulation. Each artist uses radical gameplay practices to ask where the self ends and the character begins, and what gets left behind. Also featuring works by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and John Powell-Jones, Many Ghosts, Many Shells presents gaming experiences as devices for establishing surrogate modes of existence, a new world through new selves.
When identities are increasingly fragmented across digital landscapes, these artists question how we reconcile our dispersed selves within today’s techno-political milieu. By bridging gaps between player and world, character and creator, the works in the exhibition challenge the very nature of agency and identity in a hyper-connected age where Away From Keyboard is never quite separate from Meatspace. Alter egos are often used to describe a concealed or contrasting side of a person’s personality, but in the case of playable characters or in the case of this exhibition, these alter egos become imbued with a sense of possibility – figures existing in a state of perpetual becoming, never fully whole but never entirely detached. Breaching a biographical narrative, the works in the exhibition question nostalgia, self-construction, and the processes of negotiating trauma and lived experiences that often percolate unsaid.
Sharing imaginaries across different practices, cultures and generations allows for a co-creation of richer, more inclusive visions, grounded in diverse experiences, knowledge systems, and values. In their game Our Ghosts, Our Shells, part 1 Blandy and Szeman 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. For Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley this means confronting histories of violence and mutilation through the uncovering of familial ties and oral testimony, asking questions of accountability and acceptance; while John Powell-Jones’ Web Wide World animated choose-your-own-adventure game and related ephemera encourages encounters with strange beings as we seek to understand the new universe of Durt where the protagonist Atamur has awoken void of a protective skin layer. From interrogating power and erasure in digital archives, to uncovering shared imaginaries that transcend cultures and generations, the exhibition positions gameplay as a radical tool for rethinking action in embodied engagement.
Featured works:
Petra Szemán and David Blandy, Our Ghosts, Our Shells, part 1, 2025
John Powell-Jones, Web Wide World, 2021
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, I’m Not Doing This For The Likes, 2022
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. https://davidblandy.co.uk/
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/
John Powell Jones is an artist whose work includes 3D and 2D animations, life-size characters. comic books, ceramics and wall hangings. He takes inspiration from European folklore, horror and science fiction. https://www.johnpowell-jones.co.uk/
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a Berlin and London-based artist. They received an BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Brathwaite-Shirley works in animation, sound, performance and video game development. Their practice focuses on combining lived experience with fiction to archive Black Trans existence and challenge the audience’s moral standing. https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/
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. https://www.petraszeman.com/
LINK: Many Ghosts, Many Shells
