Bonington Gallery exhibition - Weird Hope Engines
Bonington Gallery presents Weird Hope Engines - embracing the culture of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) to examine play as a site of projection, simulation and connection, and to explore imagined futures and alternate realities.
By Sarah McLeod | Published on 3 March 2025
Categories: Press office; NTU Arts;
The first exhibition of its kind, Weird Hope Engines highlights the practices of innovative designers, artists, and writers in the field of independent game design, and brings their work into dialogue with fellow travellers in the field of critical art practice.
Curated by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe, this experimental exhibition reimagines Bonington Gallery as a hybrid lab – a testing site for the development of new worlding experiences, an active gaming hub, and an archive of maps, concept artworks, rulebooks, and gaming curiosities. Visitors are invited to participate in both solo and collaborative gaming experiences that highlight questions of collective responsibility, personal testimony, and colonial legacy, reframing our expectations of gaming imaginaries as potent sites for rethinking social organisation, cross-cultural understanding, and personal reverie.
Migrating between the dreamworlds of science fiction, fantasy, folkloric myth, and pressing social realities, a series of newly commissioned play experiences by David Blandy, Chris Bisette, Laurie O’Connel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko utilise a range of mechanics, from dice rolls and diary keeping to tumble towers and the recording of personal anecdotes, to encourage new approaches to immersive play. Blandy’s Alien Pastoral: The Strain invites visitors to develop a new biological research centre to imagine a greener future. Angela Washko’s work questions the discriminatory language and gender stereotypes often used within gaming.
Original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K Kemp with Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang illustrators for Melsonian Arts Council the publishers of role playing game TROIKA! showcase the unique function of visual art within gaming imaginaries, in which image making moves beyond functional illustration into complex relationships with collaborative storytelling.
The exhibition is especially fitting for Bonington Gallery, located in Nottingham, a city with a pivotal role in gaming history. As the home of Games Workshop and the iconic Warhammer series, Nottingham has long been at the heart of the tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) scene. The city remains at the forefront of the industry, with Games Workshop recently joining the FTSE 100 as one of UK’s leading companies.
An original essay-film by the curators, produced in collaboration with Adam Sinclair and Lotti Closs, explores the shared experience of game space as a site of hallucinatory possibility.
Reactor Halls, an experimental programme of live performance, film and music events curated by Reactor, is a supporting partner of this exhibition.
Critical Hits Zine Fair – 22 March 2025
On the exhibition's opening date, Bonington Gallery will hold a day of talks, tables, and screenings celebrating the cultures of tabletop roleplaying games. The event brings together independent publishers, artists, and writers exploring themes of critical worlding, resistance, and alternative futures.
Contributors include Melsonian Arts Council, Copy/Paste Co-op, Warp Miniatures, Ramshackle Games and others. It features a programme of talks and conversations with artists from the exhibition including Zedeck Siew and Angela Washko; panel discussions on fantasy illustration, game design and miniature fabrication with Andrew Walter, Amanda Lee Franck, Scrap World, and Alex Huntley; gaming sessions with David Blandy, Andrew Walter and Angelo Washko; and a film screening programme including the documentaries World of Darkness (2017) and Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons & Dragons (2019).
Weird Hope Engines
Sat 22 March 2025 - Sat 10 May 2025
Preview: Fri 21 March 6-8pm
Notes for Editors
Press enquiries please contact Sarah McLeod, Corporate Communications Manager, on telephone +44 (0)115 848 8735, or via email.
About Bonington Gallery
Founded in 1969, Bonington Gallery has been at the forefront of Nottingham’s rich and vibrant visual arts community for over fifty years, offering an innovative and dynamic programme of local, national, and international significance. Situated at the heart of Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art & Design, our ‘art school’ context is reflected throughout our multi-disciplinary programme of exhibitions and events – presenting and exploring practices related to visual art, fashion, film, music and design. Beyond our building, our connections with colleagues in academic subject areas help ground our programme and thinking within past, present and future cultural and societal discourse
About Nottingham Trent University
Nottingham Trent University (NTU) has been named UK ‘University of the Year’ five times in six years, (Times Higher Education Awards 2017, The Guardian University Awards 2019, The Times and Sunday Times 2018 and 2023, Whatuni Student Choice Awards 2023) and is consistently one of the top performing modern universities in the UK.
It is the 3rd best modern university in the UK (The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2023). Students have voted NTU 1st in the UK for student employability (Uni Compare 2025)
NTU is the 5th largest UK institution by student numbers, with over 40,000 students and more than 4,400 staff located across six campuses. It has an international student population of almost 7,000 and an NTU community representing over 160 countries.
NTU owns two Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for outstanding achievements in research (2015, 2021). The first recognises NTU’s research on the safety and security of global citizens. The second was awarded for research in science, engineering, arts and humanities to investigate and restore cultural objects, buildings and heritage. The Research Excellence Framework (2021) classed 83% of NTU’s research activity as either world-leading or internationally excellent.
NTU was awarded GOLD in the national 2023 Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) assessment, as it was in 2019.
NTU is a top 10 for sport (British Universities and Colleges Sport league table 2023).
NTU is the most environmentally sustainable university in the UK and second in the world (UI Green Metric University World Rankings, 2023).