Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age

Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age brings together artists working across sculpture, moving image, performance, video games and installation to explore how digital technology is reshaping culture today.

The exhibition features new and recent work by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Nina Davies, Joey Holder, Most Dismal Swamp and Isaac Lythgoe. Many of these artists blend elements of folklore with speculative fiction, reworking communal myths and storytelling traditions through processes ranging from AI manipulation to 3D printing. In recent years, folktales, ancient customs and occult practices have re-entered the cultural spotlight, often as ways of reconnecting with land, history and community. At the same time, AI, gaming and social media are rapidly altering how we imagine ourselves and our futures. Phantasmagoria confronts this collision. It explores how screens can become sculptural portals through the platform-mediated crisis of contemporary society, and as traditional definitions of sculptural practice are shattered by digital experimentation, the exhibition reveals how material form still grounds even the most intangible myths of the present. By fusing the digital and the folkloric, the artists included turn to science fiction, online subcultures, post-human ecologies and the aesthetics of the glitch to question how belief systems – both ancient and algorithmic – shape our lives.

What to expect:
Installation, Multi-disciplinary, Performance / Live Art, Digital, Sculpture