Petra Szemán: North East Open Call Q&A
Petra Szemán is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. Born in Budapest and based between the North East of England and Japan. 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.
Petra was one of five selected artists for the North East Open Call last year, her video piece ‘About their distance’ was shown in a special installation including multiple screens and a lightbox in the style of a train platform sign. About their distance is about a place and its relationship to its own image, the distance between Place and Image at large, as well as dreams and rail networks.
We asked Petra a few questions about their experience in the NEOC at Middlesbrough Art Week 2025:
What made you apply to the NEOC?
I’ve seen a lot of my peers exhibit at Middlesbrough Art Week and I wanted to join their ranks, because it always seemed like an excellent and vibrant time. Also, more generally, exhibiting in the North East is something I don’t get to do that often, despite living here.
What was it like to be a part of the NEOC?
Being part of MAW on the whole was a great experience, seeing how all that art got spread across Middlesbrough’s seemingly infinite supply of shopping centres. It felt like a particularly hopeful use of meanwhile spaces, spaces that exist everywhere but often there’s barriers to utilising them, the best part being that members of the general public frequenting those shopping centres were consistently coming in, seeing what all the fuss was about. It made me think that this is how art should be, right there in the middle of one’s daily rounds in town, something everyone can dip in and out of. To be situated within that as part of NEOC was a delight, seeing how artists working across very different media and approaches were pulled together by the curator Penny Payne’s work, and the serendipity of discovering so many connections across our practices despite the open call not having been tied together by any particular prescribed theme.
What have you been working on since, and did the exhibition bring some new opportunities?
Since MAW closed I’ve been mainly working on a collaborative game project with fellow artist David Blandy, Our Ghosts Our Shells, a sort-of meta RPG that investigates one’s relationship with the various avatars we occupy, both in gaming worlds and outside. The project has been exhibited at various stages of its development across England, starting in London (Seventeen Gallery), then at Liverpool (FACT), then onto Leicester (Two Queens), and it has just circled back to London and is on show currently under the title of Our Ghosts Our Shells (Deluxe) at Chemist, running until 12 April. I would love to be able to bring this project to the North, and I hope that the connections I made across the art scene while at MAW can be part of that.
I’m currently in the early stages of starting to work towards and trying to secure funding for a new video (and possibly sculptural?? + AR??) project, thinking about water systems as infrastructure for memories and non-linear time. I will look at specific rivers in Hungary (my home country), in Japan (a place I lived and which continues to be tied to my work/life), and our very own River Derwent. I’m excited to expand the breath of physical places I explore in my practice to the North East properly for the first time!
