Petra Szemán

Petra Szemán (b. 1994, based between NE England and Japan, born in Budapest, Hungary)

Petra 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. Using a virtual version of themself as a protagonist journeying through animatic realms, they explore liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction (both on- and off-screen). Turning away from thinking of cyberspace as a radically ’other’ realm, Petra hopes to walk the line situated between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons.

Petra is a BA Fine Art graduate from Newcastle University (2013-2017), and has exhibited at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, NTT InterCommunicationCentre in Tokyo, as well as various galleries across England, Continental Europe and East Asia. After spending two years in Japan, developing a body of work as a recipient of a research scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture (2018-2020), Petra is now based between North-East England and Tokyo, Japan. They’re the co-author/editor of WEEB THEORY, a book about the overlapping area between artists’ moving image, games and anime (published by Banner Repeater, London 2023). Petra is a lecturer in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University.

www.petraszeman.com/

@petra.szeman