Angela Washko: "The Council is in Session" Exhibition Debut
Catherine B. Heller Collegiate Professor Angela Washko’s The Council is in Session will have its exhibition debut in Weird Hope Engines, on view at Nottingham Trent University’s Bonington Gallery from March 22 — May 10, 2025. Commissioned for the exhibition, The Council is in Session is a tabletop roleplaying game and participatory improvisational performance experience.
Played while seated around a table designed for the game and outfitted with custom electronics, embedded sculptural glass displays, resin polyhedral dice sets made by the artist, a generative electronic music score, and six different player booklets, The Council is in Session invites players to perform a scenario in which they are tasked with reimagining a community’s governance while responding to musical cues, instructional prompts, and finding new community and unlikely allies amidst a large scale catastrophe.
Washko’s project is funded through a 2024 Stamps Research Catalyst & Innovation Award. Catalyst and Innovation awards are administered by the Stamps Creative Practice and Research Committee, and supported through a block grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research, with matching funds from Stamps.
Weird Hope Engines embraces the culture of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) to explore play as a site of projection, simulation, communal myth-making, distorted temporality, and alternate possibility.
The first exhibition of its kind, it 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.
Original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K Kemp with Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang (Melsonia Arts Council) showcase the unique function of visual art within gaming imaginaries, in which image making moves beyond functional illustration into complex relationships with collaborative storytelling. Archival vitrines illustrate Nottingham’s essential role in the development of gaming history.
Weird Hope Engines has received advance notice in ArtReview (The 10 Exhibitions to See in March 2025) and FAD Magazine (New exhibition to investigate tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) culture).
Weird Hope Engines
Bonington Gallery
Nottingham Trent University, Bonington Building, Dryden Street, Nottingham, NG1 4GG
Exhibition Dates: March 22 — May 10, 2025; Monday – Friday, 10 am – 5 pm; Saturday, 11 am – 3 pm
Preview: Friday, March 21 from 6 — 8 pm