Belfast Exposed

Exhibitions

7th Mar - 1st Jun

Our Archive: 40 Years of Belfast Exposed

As part of this year's ongoing celebration of our 40th Anniversary, the Belfast Exposed Archive is taking over Gallery II wi...

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6th Feb - 30th Mar

Navigating Queer Landscapes

We are delighted to be working with the Queer Artist Forum to bring the work of two of its members to Embrace Style, the incl...

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Community

25th Sep - 7th Oct

Young People Behind the Lens

Over the summer, a group of young people from Start 360 explored the cityscape of Belfast. They found new ways to see the...

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21st May - 22nd May

Showing the faces of dementia with Alzheimer’s NI

Ahead of the Alzheimer’s Society Annual Conference 2019 (ASAC19), Belfast Exposed was commissioned by Alzheimer’s NI to w...

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Thresholds

Gallery 1

15th Mar 2013 to 26th Apr 2013

About The Exhibition

The perceived veracity of a photographic image, combined with its ambiguity, creates a unique space where fiction and truth intertwine. It is at this permeable border between reality and fiction that a photograph becomes a threshold to an infinite series of meanings.Thresholds explores the relationship between truth, fiction and fantasy within documentary photography. All of the artists included in the exhibition have created a body of work documenting a specific subject or site. Each image poses a challenge to our expectations of reality, and resonates with the realm of the imaginary.

Maja Daniels documents twins Monette and Mady as they go about their daily routine in Paris. The women live their lives as a performance in which they pose as the mirror image to each other, rarely appearing in public separately and never without identical clothes, hair and accessories. Daniels becomes complicit in this performance and her photographs transform the banal rituals of everyday life into a finely crafted spectacle of the uncanny.

Stephen Gill’s series Hackney Wick, also shows the ability of photography to transform the everyday into a theatre of the surreal. His photographs represent the people and objects that inhabit the area of London in which Gill lives. The ease with which the photographer encounters his subject enables him to capture the transient moment and the changing patterns that emerge and disappear in an otherwise familiar place.

Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs, Eleven Blow Ups, are at first glance instantly recognisable as scenes from a contemporary scene of conflict. These photographs are in fact elaborate fictions, digitally manipulated by the artist. Ristelhueber has used real footage of bomb craters in Iraq, and imposed these onto stills from her earlier work in Turkmenistan, Syria, Iraq and the West Bank. These images highlight the homogenising gaze of the media and actively provoke the viewer to question the veracity and authority of a photographic image.

In An Index of Time, Peter Watkins and Tereza Zelenkova present a collaborative documentary project on the Byci Skala cave in the Czech Republic. This particular cave is a rich source of local mythology and folklore. During the process of documenting the cave, the photographers were struck by the influence that these old tales had on their work. Watkins and Zelenkova explored this further by commissioning a series of short stories to be written in response to the photographs. The accompanying stories de-contextualise and de-stabilise the photographs and open up a dialogue on the interpretation of documentary photography.

Luke Stephenson is interested in documenting subcultures within British culture. In his series An Incomplete Dictionary of Showbirds,Stephenson has photographed birds commonly kept as domestic pets in the U.K. that are entered into ‘showbird’ competitions. The flattened spatial dimension and uniform background of Stephenson's images remove any trace of either the birds’ natural environment or the living rooms and competitions where they are found in the U.K. In fact, the photographs eradicate any sense of the birds as real, living creatures. Instead they are presented as purely decorative, fantastical forms, to be viewed in the same way that one might look at depictions of birds of paradise on the pages of an illustrated book.

The Artists

Maja Daniels Stephen Gill Sophie Ristelhueber Luke Stephenson Peter Watkins Tereza Zelenkova

Events

Artists Talk

Friday 15th March | 3pm | Belfast Exposed

Free Admission
Creative Writing Workshop

Saturday 20th April | 2pm - 4pm | Belfast Exposed

Free Admission