image courtesy of Petra Szemán from Openings, 2022
Bob Bicknell-Knight
David Blandy
Emily Mulenga
Hardeep Pandhal
David Steans
Petra Szemán
Christian Wright
With Ami Clarke, Sahej Rahal
& Cole James Graham
The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete
Curated by Jamie Sutcliffe & Petra Szemán
Friday 13th Jan - April 29th
Open Saturdays 12-6pm
(if you would like to arrange a student visit, please get in touch)
With the compulsive energy of an anime binge-watch, The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete observes the technical, perceptual, and emotional intervals of the contemporary animated image.
From macabre cartoon studios to NPC burial grounds, pre-rendered cyberpunk megacities to hauntingly vacant train platforms, this group exhibition assembles a body of artists films that pursue the animatic affordances of cartoons and video games, while tentatively defining their own vernaculars of critical fandom.
Curated by writer Jamie Sutcliffe and artist Petra Szemán, the show anticipates the publication of WEEB THEORY by Banner Repeater in 2023, an edited volume of artists’ texts, interviews, and essays that interrogate the inter-media resonances of contemporary animation, be they produced by popular cartoon shows and video games, or animation theory and artists video.
Featuring works by Bob Bicknell-Knight, David Blandy, Emily Mulenga, Hardeep Pandhal, David Steans, Petra Szemán and Christian Wright, and including contributions from Ami Clarke, Cole James Graham and Sahej Rahal, The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete indifferently sidesteps notions of digital dualism to situate animation in peculiar proximities to the bodies that manufacture and consume it.
Following theorist Deborah Levitt’s suggestion that developments in commercial and industrial animation have defined a new techno-political continuum in which the relationship between body and image has been irrevocably complicated, The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete asks how animated images might produce, pollute, or populate our emergent media-saturated lifeworlds, inducing multi-planar reveries and hybridised forms of perception.
Bios:
Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. He is the editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, and his essays, reviews and interviews have been published by Art Monthly, Art Agenda, Art Review, Frieze, Rhizome, The White Review, The Quietus amongst others.
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. They are based between NE England and Tokyo, Japan.
Please join us for the launch of
WEEB THEORY
Edited by Jamie Sutcliffe & Petra Szemán
And an afternoon preview of the VR work:
Pandemonium: do androids dream of? by Ami Clarke,
in discussion with Jamie Sutcliffe
12-6pm 29th April
Conversation 2pm
The exhibition The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete, curated by writer Jamie Sutcliffe and artist Petra Szemán, programmed as a precursor to the publication of WEEB THEORY (Banner Repeater '23), comes to an end on the 29th April.
Please join us for a finissage event and launch of the hotly anticipated book: WEEB THEORY on the 29th between 12-6pm, where the book will be on sale, and available for signing throughout the afternoon. (You can also purchase the book online here)
Following theorist Deborah Levitt’s suggestion that developments in commercial and industrial animation have defined a new techno-political continuum in which the relationship between body and image has been irrevocably complicated, WEEB THEORY asks how animated images might produce, pollute, or populate our emergent media-saturated lifeworlds, inducing multi-planar reveries and hybridised forms of perception. The result is an edited volume of artists’ texts, interviews, and essays that interrogate the inter-media resonances of contemporary animation produced by popular cartoon shows and video games, animation theory and artists video.
Pandemonium: do androids dream of? VR - Preview with Ami Clarke
During the afternoon a sneak preview of the new VR work: Pandemonium: do androids dream of? by Ami Clarke, will continue an ongoing conversation between the artist and writer Jamie Sutcliffe, that began with The Underlying that appears in WEEB THEORY. Realised during a Beyond Matter residency at ZKM, Germany, Pandemonium furthers Clarke’s enquiry into concepts of emergence within surveillance and disaster capitalism. Pandemonium is currently exhibited in Immerse at Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia, curated by Corina L. Apostol (Tallinn Art Hall) and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (ZKM, Karlsruhe).
Bios:
Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. He is the editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, and his essays, reviews and interviews have been published by Art Monthly, Art Agenda, Art Review, Frieze, Rhizome, The White Review, The Quietus amongst others.
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. They are based between NE England and Tokyo, Japan.
Ami Clarke is an artist working hybridly across video/sound, sculpture, live data/writing and VR, that often come together in installation. Their work critically engages with concerns that bridge finance, the environment and late capitalism, from an intersectional posthuman position with a focus on themes of emergence. They are also founder of Banner Repeater and the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP).