Petra Szemán will deliver workshops and undertake a residency with mentoring from the QUAD curatorial team

We are delighted to announce that Petra Szemán has been selected for the QUAD Digital Participation Artist Residency & Exhibition opportunity. Our Curatorial Team and Education Team will be working closely supporting Petra to deliver workshops, undertake residency with mentoring from curatorial team to develop the works and an exhibition from September 2024 to February 2025.

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.