Exhibition / Digital Nostalgia
Exhibition Launch: Digbeth First Friday, 06.06.2025, 6 – 9PM
Open: 07 – 13.06.2025, 12 – 6PM
Centrala is proud to announce an exciting new collaboration with West Midlands-based artist _kyjhi, presenting their first large-scale audio-visual installation, Digital Nostalgia.
This immersive, week-long installation transforms the gallery into a dreamlike digital version of Birmingham. Drawing from the aesthetics of 90s and early 2000s gaming, Digital Nostalgia uses low-poly models, pixelated textures, and retro render techniques to recreate scenes of urban decay, overlooked alleyways, graffiti-marked structures, and other fragments of the city’s visual identity. The result is a world that feels both uncannily familiar and subtly detached, a Birmingham remembered and reimagined.
Known for their distinctive visual style and growing presence on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, _kyjhi has built a strong following by reinterpreting real locations in Blender using a low-resolution, gaming-inspired approach. However, Digital Nostalgia invites audiences to experience this work in an entirely new way. Displayed at large scale and accompanied by ambient sound, the exhibition goes far beyond what can be experienced on a mobile screen. The shift in scale and aspect ratio reveals new visual layers and details, textures, structures, and atmosphere that can’t be fully appreciated on a phone screen.
An original ambient soundtrack, composed by _kyjhi, deepens the experience. The soundscape is atmospheric and meditative, reflecting the tone of the visuals and encouraging a slower, more contemplative interaction with the work. Objects that feature within the videos will be brought to life to further blur the line between the digital and real, grounding the imagined world in fragments of lived experience.
The exhibition launches at Centrala on Digbeth First Friday, 6 June 2025, with a public preview from 6 – 9PM, offering a first chance to see Digital Nostalgia in its full, immersive form. The exhibition then continues daily from 7 – 13 June, open 12 – 6PM.
_kyjhi’s vision of Birmingham as a playable, almost haunted cityscape opens up new ways of seeing the everyday, and this exhibition marks a significant moment in their practice, and in the way digital art can be experienced in physical space.