EVENT: HOU LAM TSUI (FEBRUARY 14—27 2025)

Rabu Rabu

digital video, colour, sound, 18’ 18”, 2024, Hong Kong

created by Hou Lam Tsui

Rabu Rabu (meaning lovey-dovey in Japanese) reimagines and subverts the conventions of Japanese dating simulation games, known for their focus on interactions with attractive young female characters. Instead, it presents a fictional scenario where the traditional trajectory of falling in love and winning over the protagonist is no longer an option. Drawing on Eva Illouz’s The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations, which describes ‘unloving’ as a narrative without a clear structure, Rabu Rabu reflects on agency both within and beyond the screen. By intertwining digital and physical AFK (Away From Keyboard) worlds, the work examines life in a heteronormative society shaped by late capitalism and dissolves the boundaries between game and video.

Hou Lam Tsui (b. 1997) is an artist who works across moving image, sculpture, installation, and text. Her practice centres around personal experience, affect, gender politics, and peripheral storytelling. Tsui rethinks how femininity and queerness are imagined within cultures, critically exploring how media and consumer desires shape emotions, our notion of love, femininity, and identities by drawing inspiration from pop culture, advertisement, anime, literature and beyond.  Her work has been previously exhibited and screened at ACMI (Australia), Art Basel Films (Hong Kong), Beijing International Short Film Festival (China), Guangdong Times Museum (China), Para Site (Hong Kong), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong), among others. Selected recent exhibitions include Follow the Feeling(Guangdong Times Museum, 2024), One is not born a woman (Square Street Gallery, 2023), Post-Human Narratives—In the Name of Scientific Witchery (Para Site; Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, 2022). She is a recipient of the WMA Graduate Award (2024), the Liu Shiming Art Foundation Scholarship (2024), and Para Site’s 2046 Fermentation + Fellowships (2022). Tsui lives and works in Hong Kong. She received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from the University of Leeds in 2018 and later obtained an MFA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024.

EVENT: NATALIE MAXIMOVA (JANUARY 31—FEBRUARY 13 2025)

Awaiting Oblivion

digital video, colour, sound, 20’ 23”, 2024, Russia

created by Natalie Maximova

World premiere

Awaiting Oblivion interrogates the collapse of simulated reality in The Last of Us Part II, uncovering spaces where the boundaries between representation and existence dissolve. As the digital world fractures into glitches and voids, it exposes the instability of meaning, unmasking the illusion of coherence, and confronting observers with absence that lies at the heart of perception. Maximova uses the embedded photo mode functions as a critical apparatus, transforming observation into an active engagement with the ungraspable. The poetic structure of her voice over amplifies the dissonance between digital precision and the fluid, ephemeral quality of ecological and philosophical questions, echoing the tensions between order and chaos in post-humanist discourse.

Natalie Maximova is an interdisciplinary artist and photographer based in London UK. She holds a Master’s degree from the ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne and has also studied at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Maximova’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including Now Play This festival, Sickhoes #6 imitate - manipulate – simulate at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Milan Machinima Festival (VRAL), the 6th and 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Balagan!!! in Kühlhaus Berlin and others. Her work has been featured in various publications including Spectator, Il Giornale dell’Arte, Camera Austria, Bird in Flight, Calvert Journal, and Vice among others. She has also contributed to Screen Images In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast, edited by Winfried Gerling, Sebastian Möring and Marco De Mutiis and published by Kulturverlag Kadmos in 2023.

EVENT: ANDY HUGHES (JANUARY 3—16 2025, ONLINE)

Shimmer

digital video, color, sound, 11’, 2024, United Kingdom

created by Andy Hughes

Shimmer creatively combines photographic assemblage, archival footage, and video game imagery, to interrogate the vitality and agency of materials, positioning pollution and climate change as pivotal concerns while destabilizing the dichotomy between animate and ostensibly inert matter such as “plastics”.

Andy Hughes is a British artist whose practice centers on the littoral zone and the politics of plastic waste, with a significant focus on machinima as a medium to explore the ecological and philosophical implications of pollution, materiality, and human-environment relationships. Hughes studied fine art at Cardiff University and received a scholarship to study photography at the Royal College of Art, London. He was the first artist in residence at Tate Gallery St. Ives. For more than thirty years, he has collaborated with scientists, curators, publishers, NGOs, academics, other artists, and many communities sympathetic to those aiming to examine and consider our relationships with plastic and pollution-related matters. Recent work aims to transcend the conventional trope of “raising awareness” about plastic pollution, instead utilizing machinima as a tool to explore the intersections of weirdness, magic, and Timothy Morton’s philosophical concepts. Through this medium, Hughes reconfigures ecological narratives, positioning them within a broader ontological and speculative framework.

EVENT: LUKE CASPAR PEARSON (NOVEMBER 8—21 2024, ONLINE)

Reyner Banham Loves Los Santos

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 5’ 15”, 2016, United Kingdom

created by Luke Caspar Pearson

Reyner Banham Loves Los Santos reimagines Banham’s original exploration of Los Angeles through the virtual lens of Grand Theft Auto V. In this adaptation sui generis of a 1972 BBC documentary, Banham’s vision of a city defined by mobility over monumentality is amplified within the sprawling, simulated metropolis of Los Santos. Just as Banham embraced the freeways and fluidity of LA’s urban fabric, Los Santos takes this mobility to an extreme, where the ability to instantly commandeer any vehicle represents a new kind of urban experience, rooted in speed, freedom, and fluid motion. Luke Caspar Pearson’s machinima reflects Banham’s fascination with the paradoxes of the city – its chaotic structure and capacity for personal liberation. The narrative juxtaposes Banham’s celebration of LA’s automotive culture with the lawless nature of Los Santos, transforming Banham’s intellectual engagement with LA into a playful yet critical examination of the intersections between urbanism, architecture, and video game spaces.

Luke Caspar Pearson is a London-based architect, academic, and co-founder of the design research practice You+Pea, where he explores the intersection of video game technologies and architectural design. As an Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, he founded and co-directs the new Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch programme, emerging from his work with the innovative Videogame Urbanism studio. His research focuses on how digital tools can engage new audiences with architectural design. Luke is the co-author of Videogame Atlas: Mapping Interactive Worlds (Thames & Hudson, 2022) and his work has been widely published in journals such as eflux Architecture, Design Studies and Architectural Research Quarterly.  His design projects have been featured in exhibitions at venues like the Royal Institute of British Architects, Somerset House and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

EVENT: HUGO ARCIER (OCTOBER 25—NOVEMBER 07 2024)

LIMBUS IV

single channel video (UHD), color, sound,  8’ 27”, 2024, France

created by Hugo Arcier

Limbus by Hugo Arcier is an ongoing machinima series that explores inaccessible spaces within video games such as Rage, Grand Theft Auto V and now Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II through the use of glitches and modding. By positioning the camera in impossible perspectives, such as beneath the ground, Arcier reveals hidden layers of these virtual worlds, transforming glitches from technical errors into aesthetic opportunities. Drawing on the concept of “limbo” as a state of ambiguity and incompleteness, the series presents these digital environments as fragile and transient, exposing the hollowness of the virtual spaces we inhabit. Like its predecessors, Limbus IV invites viewers to reflect on the nature of virtual reality, subverting the conventional structures of video games to offer a philosophical meditation on presence and absence, unrealized potential and shadows of lost data.

Hugo Arcier transcends the conventional boundaries of artistic practice, positioning himself as an “artist in a digital world”. Harnessing the expansive potential of 3D computer graphics, Arcier channels his creative vision into a diverse range of mediums, seamlessly weaving together videos, prints, and sculptures. While his initial foray into the artistic realm was through the realm of special effects for renowned feature filmmakers such as Roman Polanski, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, it is through this trajectory that he cultivated an unparalleled mastery of digital tools, particularly in the realm of 3D graphic imagery. Arcier’s artistic prowess has garnered global acclaim, with his works showcased in prestigious international festivals, including Elektra, Videoformes, and Némo. His creative explorations have further permeated the hallowed walls of Magda Danysz and Plateforme Paris, alongside art venues like the New Museum and the New Media Art Center of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Notably, Arcier’s distinctive artistic voice has resonated across the global art landscape, finding a home in revered institutions like Le Cube, Okayama Art Center, and the iconic Palais de Tokyo. He lives and works in Paris.