Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age
Sculpture Galleries, Henry Moore Institute
15 May – 31 August 2026
Free entry
Press release
Henry Moore Institute presents Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, a major group exhibition bringing together a new generation of artists exploring how digital technologies are reshaping what sculpture can be, and how it can be used to tell stories about our past, present, and future.
Participating artists include Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Nina Davies, Joey Holder, Joe Moss, Most Dismal Swamp, Steph Linn and Philip Speakman, Isaac Lythgoe and Rustan Söderling. Working across sculpture, moving image, performance, video games and installation, new and recent work in the exhibition shares a fascination with the collision of folklore and contemporary digital culture.
Over the past decade, renewed interest in folk traditions, myth and occult practices has emerged alongside the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, gaming and social media. In Phantasmagoria, these seemingly distant fields of creativity converge. The artists fuse ancient narrative structures with digital processes such as AI manipulation, 3D printing and platform-based media, revealing how fiction, enchantment and collective belief continue to shape our world today.
The exhibition’s title refers to an 18th-century form of theatrical spectacle that used light projections or magic lanterns to conjure apparitions, often blurring entertainment, séance and illusion. Later adopted by Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin, phantasmagoria became a metaphor for the seductive illusions of commodity capitalism. Many of the artists in the exhibition are similarly attuned to the enchantments of contemporary technology and the forms of belief it generates.
Several works examine how digital platforms produce shared fictions and role-playing environments where reality and invention blur. Nina Davies responds to TikTok trends in which users mimic AI-generated videos, while Most Dismal Swamp’s Scraper 2023 layers sculpture, performance and AI to evoke the dense, crisis-ridden architectures of contemporary platform-mediated culture. A new commission by Steph Linn and Philip Speakman reimagines the 16th-century Kett’s Rebellion through sculptural structures and vertical-format video, connecting historical protest to questions around performance and politics in the age of social media.
Material transformation remains central throughout the exhibition. Isaac Lythgoe’s hybrid sculptures combine industrial processes and organic matter to blur distinctions between the human, animal and synthetic, while Joey Holder constructs research-driven fictional worlds where myth and speculative science intertwine. The exhibition culminates with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s PIRATING BLACKNESS / BLACKTRANSSEA.COM 2021, recently acquired by the Arts Council Collection. Drawing on Afrofuturism and Black Atlantic histories, the work reimagines the archive as a participatory, mythic space shaped by lived experience rather than fixed historical authority.
Together, the works in Phantasmagoria invite audiences to reconsider sculpture as something that moves fluidly between the material and the digital, the factual and the fictional. While several artists deploy AI, it is consistently used as a critical, reflective tool rather than a neutral technology. The exhibition asks how new forms of image-making and storytelling are reshaping knowledge, community and belief, and what role sculpture might play in navigating these transformations.
A programme of events will accompany the exhibition, including performances by Joe Moss and Nina Davies, and a podcast series produced in collaboration with Future Artefacts, featuring newly commissioned audio works.
Main image: Joey Holder, ‘The Woosphere’ 2025.
Sound: Aja Ireland.
Graphics and web design: Florian Mecklenburg.
Chatbots: Sade Mae.
Web development: Joel Cocks.
Consultancy by Moth Quantum: Declan Colquitt, and Günseli Yalcinkaya.
Commissioned by Vienna Digital Cultures.
Jointly organised by Foto Arsenal Wien and Kunsthalle Wien.
For media inquiries and more information, please contact:
Alicia Lethbridge
Sam Talbot
alicia@sam-talbot.com
Matthew Brown
Sam Talbot
matthew@sam-talbot.com
Kara Chatten, Marketing & Communications Manager
Henry Moore Institute
kara.chatten@henry-moore.org
Emily Dodgson, Head of Marketing & Enterprise
Henry Moore Foundation
emily.dodgson@henry-moore.org
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Notes to editors
About Henry Moore Institute
Henry Moore Institute welcomes everyone to visit their galleries, research library and archive of sculptors’ papers to experience, enjoy and research sculpture from around the world. The newly refurbished Institute can be found in the centre of Leeds, the city where Henry Moore (1898–1986) began his training as a sculptor. Their changing programme of historical, modern and contemporary exhibitions and events encourage thinking about what sculpture is, how it is made and the artists who make it.
As part of the Henry Moore Foundation, they are a hub for sculpture, connecting a global network of artists and scholars, continuing research into the art form and ensuring that sculpture is accessible and celebrated by a wide audience.
The long-established partnership of Leeds City Council and the Henry Moore Foundation began with the development of the Sculpture Study Centre in Leeds Art Gallery in 1982 and led to the development of the Henry Moore Institute in 1993. It now represents an unparalleled collaboration in the collection, study and presentation of sculpture. The Leeds Sculpture Collections lies at the heart of their work together, underpinned by the complimentary research and curatorial expertise of both organisations.
Free entry
Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–17:00
About the Henry Moore Foundation
The Henry Moore Foundation was founded by the artist and his family in 1977 to encourage public appreciation of the visual arts.
Today we support innovative sculpture projects, devise an imaginative programme of exhibitions and research worldwide, and preserve the legacy of Moore himself: one of the great sculptors of the 20th century, who did so much to bring the art form to a wider audience.
We run two venues, in Leeds and Hertfordshire, showing a mix of Moore’s own work and other sculpture.
We also fund a variety of sculpture projects through our Henry Moore Grants and Research programmes and we have a world-class collection of artworks which regularly tour both nationally and internationally.
A registered charity, we award grants to arts organisations around the world, with a mission to bring great sculpture to as many people as possible.
About the artists
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, UK) works predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video game development. Her practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell and archive the stories of Black Trans people. Drawing on ancestral histories and lost gods, Brathwaite-Shirley uses interactive technologies to create participatory spaces that challenge hegemonic narratives and encourage active engagement where multiple players communally construct a narrative pathway. Brathwaite-Shirley’s projects offer players the opportunity to navigate choices that confront their assumptions and biases, fostering deeper conversations about identity, privilege, and systemic oppression.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s work has been exhibited at Serpentine, London (2025); LAS Foundation, Halle am Berghain, Berlin (2024); Studio Voltaire, London (2024); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024); Villa Arson, Nice (2023); and FACT, Liverpool (2022).
Nina Davies
Nina Davies’ (b. 1991, Canada) work considers dance in popular culture, particularly its dissemination, circulation and consumption. Working primarily with video, sculpture and performance, Davies considers the technological roots of dance phenomena such as TikTok dances and video game choreography, focusing on the commodification of the dancing body and speculatively reframing contemporary dances as the folk dances of the future. Davies’ work oscillates between fiction and non-fiction, often using a fiction podcast from the near future to comment on our lived encounters with today’s technological culture. Her work offers new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices and the digitisation of the human body.
Nina Davies studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art, London and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been exhibited at FACT, Liverpool (2025); Western Front, Vancouver (2025); The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2024); and Matt’s Gallery, London (2023).
Joey Holder
Joey Holder (b. 1986, UK) makes research-driven installations that generate fictional worlds in response to contemporary, real-world events. Holder often works with computational geneticists, marine biologists, behavioural psychologists and investigative journalists to address themes including future farming, disinformation, folkloric creatures, synthetic biology and deep-sea ecosystems. Her work is interested in the limits of human knowledge, the unknowns and unclassifiable character life on and beyond earth. Holder’s installations invite us to observe the porous boundary between humans, animals and machines. She suggests the impermanence and interchangeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds, claiming instead that ‘everything is a mutant and a hybrid’.
Joey Holder studied at Kingston University, London and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been exhibited at Galleria Sculptor, Helsinki (2024); X Museum, Beijing (2023); Matt’s Gallery, London (2018), and the Design Museum, London (2018).
Joe Moss
Joe Moss (b. 1991, UK) creates sculpture, video and events informed by networked culture, where competing fictions collapse into one another. His work situates the viewer within thin fictional structures which reveal their artifice through moments of contrast or revelation in the increasing pace, overlap and repetition in our everyday encounters with social and technological narratives. Deploying AI and complex laser cutting techniques alongside traditional mosaic, his recent work draws on Leila A. Villaverde and Roymeico A. Carter’s theory of ‘the proleptic’: the collapse of past, present and future, where fiction, reality and progress blur.
Joe Moss studied at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art, London and the Slade School of Art, London. He was a participant in the Conditions Studio Programme, Croydon, and New Contemporaries (2024), with solo shows at Matt’s Gallery (2026), Chemist Gallery (2026), and Well Projects, Margate (2024).
Most Dismal Swamp
Most Dismal Swamp is a project emerging from the curatorial, artistic, and research practice of Dane Sutherland (b. 1985, UK). The project’s multimedia work involves collaboration with a wide network of artists and combines performance, sculpture, computer generated imaging, AI processes and writing. These projects are conceived as multi-user shared hallucinations – a term borrowed from online roleplaying games in which a shared set of highly specific rules help construct an immersive fictional world. A rigorous ‘acid pessimism’ animates the work of Most Dismal Swamp: an acerbic yet playful immersion into composite hallucinatory lifeworlds, gamespaces, and protocols – what Sutherland calls the ‘folkless lore’ of modern life – that constitute the hostile architectures of our shared platform-mediated crises.
Dane Sutherland completed his PhD at Edinburgh School of Art. Projects by Most Dismal Swamp have appeared at Autotelic Foundation, London (2025); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023, online); and Mira Digital Arts Festival, Barcelona (2021).
Steph Linn and Philip Speakman
Steph Linn is a London based North American artist who uses sculpture, installation and publications to examine the history of knitting and computation. Philip Speakman (b. 1993, UK) is an artist based in London. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Slade School of Art researching the use of anomalous fictions as tools of online political myth-making. Their work together explores the persistence of vernacular and folkloric traditions and the politics of their contemporary reproduction, ranging from the mechanisation and digitisation of craft and textile production, to the folktales which emerge online.
Steph Linn studied at the Slade. Philip Speakman studied at Central Saint Martins and the Slade. This will be both Linn’s and Speakman’s first institutional group show.
Isaac Lythgoe
Isaac Lythgoe’s (b. 1989, Guernsey) sculpture repurposes ideas from narrative and storytelling traditions. His work considers prospective technologies and how they might influence our future societal structures. By combining a wide variety of materials – fibreglass, car paint, 3D printed plastics, welded metal, cow stomach leather, oak and cherry wood – he invites an uncomfortable hybridisation of the animal, the human and the inanimate. Activated by notions of ethics, romance and mortality, Lythgoe’s objects consider the integration of synthetic and biological systems as the most prescient grounds for change to the human experience. These ideas are approached both conceptually and materially; works appear as stories and characters, playing out in a blend of symbolic organic materials and new media techniques, the handmade and the machined in continual flux.
Isaac Lythgoe studied at Wimbledon College of Art, London and the Royal College of Art, London. His work has been exhibited at Duarte Sequeira, Seoul, KR (2024); Production Residency at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, FR, (2024); Somerset House, London, UK, (2024); and MUDAM, Luxembourg, LX, (2023) amongst others.
Rustan Söderling
Rustan Söderling (b. Gothenburg, 1984) is an artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam (NL) whose work focuses primarily on moving image and animation. He is often concerned with history as a narrative that can be taken apart, revised and reassembled. Drawing inspiration from British and northern European folklore, as well as popular science fiction, the past and the future collapse into the indeterminate present in which many of Söderling’s films are set. Forests, ancient burials, and lost objects examined with an anthropologist’s imagination collide with technology to invoke a shifting tension between the virtual and the artefactual.
Rustan Söderling studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and completed a two-year residency at De Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include: Konstepidemin, Gothenburg (2024); LAAK, The Hague (2023); Gossamer Fog, London (2022); Like A Little Disaster, Polignano a Mare (2025).