Preview - Supermedium: Kelan Andrews and Petra Szemán

Slip through layers of celluloid animation into an exhibition that asks what it means to animate: to bring life to human-scale animatronics, or to a digital avatar crossing candy-coloured landscapes.

Supermedium will showcase commissions and existing work by Kelan Andrews and Petra Szemán, alongside items from the legendary Manchester animation studio Cosgrove Hall Films Archive. The artists’ new works are developed in dialogue with the archive that is home to items from some of the UK’s most iconic and beloved hand-drawn and stop motion animations – Danger Mouse (1981-92) The BFG (1989), The Wind in the Willows (1983-90) and Postman Pat (2004 to 2008) to name just a few.

Both artists blur physical and digital realms, working across video, sculpture, stop-motion animation, digital animation, augmented reality, and animatronics. Showing archive material alongside new commissions, the exhibition will open up a dialogue between animation – past, present and future. At a time when digital technologies often overshadow analogue processes, Kelan Andrews and Petra Szemán explore what can be gained by pushing the limits of both.

The works in this exhibition will invite visitors to consider the relationship between the real and the imagined. To consider what animated worlds at the intersection of experience and technology might teach us about how we perceive and shape the world and are shaped by it.