EVENT: FIRAS SHEHADEH (MAY 9—22 2025, ONLINE)

The Way of the Future

Single-channel UHD video (color), 2-channel sound, 8’ 02”, 2025, Palestine

created by Firas Shehadeh

Set against the hauntingly desolate backdrop of The Last of Us video game, The Way of the Future follows a lone figure traversing a decayed territory after a long war, where echoes of resistance and displacement reverberate through the hollow ruins. The sound design, deeply rooted in the auditory textures of the attacked country — prayers and drones — brings a dislocated yet familiar reality. As the protagonist moves through these fragmented spaces, their journey becomes an allegory for the ongoing struggle: a fight not only for physical territory but for the survival of identity, memory, and visibility. Blurring the lines between the physical and media landscapes, the film explores a future where the cause transcends borders and occupies the global consciousness, a spectral nation fighting to reclaim existence in a political world order that continuously erases them.

Firas Shehadeh is a Palestinian artist and researcher exploring issues of identity, meaning, and aesthetics in the digital age. His interdisciplinary practice engages with post-colonial effects, technology, and history through the lens of worldbuilding and internet culture. Shehadeh holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His education also includes studies in conceptual art, video, and architecture in Vienna, Barcelona, and Amman. Investigating topics like colonial legacies, memory, and belonging, Shehadeh creates speculative narratives that reveal unseen structures and realities. His research-focused practice utilizes and subverts the visual languages of new media, examining how technology transforms society’s relationship with knowledge and power. His work, which has been exhibited internationally, offers a critical perspective on the role of the internet and digital imaging in shaping contemporary identities, histories, and ways of world-making.

EVENT: DOUGLAS DIXON-BARKER (APRIL 25—MAY 8 2025, ONLINE)

untitled (archive)

16mm, color, 3’, 2024, United Kingdom

created by Douglas Dixon-Barker

vral.org

 

untitled (archive) is a machinima sui generis that transposes the residual memory of a videogame into the granular materiality of 16mm film. Framed as “an imperfect archive”, the work embraces degradation not as failure but as structure, treating loss as a generative condition. In collapsing the multitelic potential of the digital into the fixed duration of celluloid, Douglas Dixon-Barker offers a quietly radical proposition: that the act of translation itself might constitute a viable archival gesture, even — especially? — when it fails to preserve the full breadth of experience.

Douglas Dixon-Barker is an artist and filmmaker currently living between Leeds and Barcelona. Drawing on the history of avant-garde and structuralist filmmaking, their work reframes genre and digital environments through unstable formats, hybrid temporalities, and the material conditions of visual systems. Their filmography includes In Your Arms (2020), Ultimate Crush (2019), untitled (camera roll) (2017), Summer (2014) (2016), For Life (2015), and 「 A M V 」 (2014–2015). They also directed In a Hopeless Place (2013) and contributed to s01e03 (2020). Dixon-Barker is affiliated with Kinet, a virtual studio dedicated to avant-garde cinema.

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: HARRISON WADE REISHMAN (JANUARY 17—30 2025, ONLINE)

Ida B. Wells: A Red Record

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 39’ 34”, 2020, United States of America

created by Harrison Wade Reishman

Ida B. Wells: A Red Record is a biographical machinima that examines the life and contributions of Ida B. Wells, a trailblazing African American journalist and activist. Conceived during the Covid-19 lockdown through the innovative use of the Red Dead Redemption 2 game engine, the film transforms Wells’ seminal investigative journalism into a sophisticated cinematic narrative. By leveraging the intricate virtual environments of the game and employing a nuanced narration, the film reconstructs Wells’ relentless documentation of lynching atrocities in the American South during the 1890s, drawing extensively from her landmark publication, The Red Record. The production combines historical accuracy with the creative latitude afforded by video game aesthetics, deploying almost thirty characters to re-enact pivotal moments of Wells’ life. 

Hailing from Hurricane, West Virginia, Harrison Wade Reishman is an accomplished filmmaker and innovator in machinima whose work explores the confluence of traditional cinema and game-driven narratives. A graduate of the University of Virginia with dual degrees in Psychology and Marketing, Reishman combines narrative sophistication with technical expertise in his visual storytelling. His career trajectory includes roles as a UTA agent trainee and a television development executive at Entertainment One, where he contributed to acclaimed productions such as Hung (HBO) and Hell on Wheels (AMC). Transitioning to independent filmmaking, he received a Taliesin Nexus grant in 2018 to direct Crosswinds, and has since directed and produced a series of critically recognized short films. Currently based in Los Angeles, Reishman continues to push the boundaries of machinima as a transformative medium for storytelling.