Stone Portals — Leo Robinson — Gameplay & Research Sharing March 22nd

March 10, 2025 8:43 am
3D render on a black background of a faint blueish purple outline of a mountain form, with a pink drawing of a figure overlaid.

Market Gallery is pleased to present a sharing of Stone Portals, two events unpacking artist Leo Robinson’s current research. Engaging with stone carvings from across three continents, Stone Portals explores questions of ancestry, ritual and belonging, hoping to provide often absent archetypal narratives to those searching for a sense of diasporic understanding.

While you are welcome to attend both events, please note that they are ticketed separately. The venues are next to one another, and both are wheelchair accessible with accessible gender-neutral toilets. Snacks and drinks will be provided at both events. Travel and childcare bursaries are available, please get in touch at market@marketgallery.org to request them.

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Gameplay Event: 2.30–4pm

An intimate test-play session for a new card game Leo has been developing since 2023. This single-player quest game – also playable collaboratively – guides players on a journey through the feeling of longing for a lost home. 

The game appropriates images from postal stamps in St. Vincent and the Grenadines depicting Carnival from the 1970s to the present day. These images, often originally filtered through a fetishistic or idealistic lens, are recontextualised to construct new narratives and meanings in conversation with archetypes from Jungian psychoanalysis and Tarot, Afro-Futurist and pop-cultural references, and the work of black theorists such as Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

This event is open to people with connections to histories of migration or who identify as part of a diaspora. It will take place in our space at 13 Ross Street and is free but ticketed.

Book here – Gameplay
A white table with cards scattered across it, two cards are black and blue with a white and yellow orb in the middle surrounded by a golden border. One blueish purple card is in focus in the foreground, a figure in the middle with the word ‘freed’ in a green oval - there are three other blue and purple cards across the table.
Image courtesy of Leo Robinson

Research Sharing & Discussion Event:  4.30–6pm

A presentation and discussion around Leo’s research and current moving-image work in development, which explores a narrative parallel to the card game. Incorporating real-world travel and family relations, the work layers symbolic and speculative storytelling with 3D rendering and video game aesthetics to create ‘portals’ between geographical and psychological topographies. The sharing will include a discussion with participants around the test-play experience.

This event is open to all. It will take place in Many Studios at 3 Ross Street and is free but ticketed.

Book here – Research Sharing
3D rendered scan of a stone with circular engravings on it in a field surrounded by a stone wall on green grass.
Image courtesy of Leo Robinson

Leo Robinson is an artist living and working between London and Glasgow. With the creation of maps, diagrams, games, ritual objects and music, Leo forms speculative networks of symbol, knowledge and ritual. His work often suggests a future or parallel civilization in which these belief systems have been reconstructed from fragments, through acts of hybridity and reappropriation, as a form of healing from the legacies of colonial displacement and erasure.

In 2023, Leo completed a research and production residency at G.A.S. founded by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, supported by Tiwani Contemporary. His work has been exhibited in major institutions such as London Mithraeum, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff and The Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow. ⁠Leo was recently announced as the winner of the Arts Foundation Futures Award in Visual Art for 2025. 

A photograph of people filling the image, wearing decorative floaty dresses, some sparkly and some with floral embroidery. The person in the foreground is wearing a yellow beaded necklace with bigger burgundy beads laced throughout.
Image courtesy of Leo Robinson
Low green trees submerged outlining a river, a 3D rendered ball with a green/blue and purple swirl is overlaid on the image of the river. Subtitles at the bottom read “Bring me something for the feast…then perhaps I could teach you a song”.
Image courtesy of Leo Robinson

*Our Resource Library will be open during this event*