Join us in person at QUAD Digital Studio for our exhibition launch event on 28 September (Saturday) at 1 PM for an exhibition tour, ‘Towards a New Monomyth’ by Petra Szemán with Assistant Curator Jodi Kwok, followed by a little insider walkthrough and plannings of the works and exhibition, for the artist to share about their practice, the experience of being selected for the QUAD Digital Participation Artist Residency & Exhibition opportunity with a Q&A session at the end.

Artist Bio:  

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. From this uniquely conceived and drafted kinetic viewpoint, fragments of different worlds segue into view, signalling perceptual ruptures that seemingly force subjectivity outside of itself, into strange new relationships of interdependency and intoxication with the moving image.

Petra Szemán is a BA Fine Art graduate from Newcastle University (2013-2017) and has exhibited since at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, NTT Inter Communication Centre in Tokyo, as well as various galleries across England, Continental Europe and East-Asia. After spending two years in Japan, developing a body of work as a recipient of a research scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture (2018-2020), Petra is now based between North-East England and Tokyo, Japan. They’re the co-author/editor of WEEB THEORY, a book about the overlapping area between artists’ moving image, games and anime (published by Banner Repeater, London 2023). Petra is a lecturer in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University.

Petra Szeman is the 2024 QUAD Digital Participation Artist in Residence. This residency and exhibition is generously funded by Arts Council England and Derby City Council.