Thomas Albdorf at Belfast Exposed

About The Exhibition

Belfast Exposed is delighted to present a selection of three bodies of work by Vienna-based conceptual artist Thomas Albdorf. This exhibition forms part of the Belfast Photo Festival 2022.

Albdorf’s work sits at the intersection between photography and sculpture. The narratives behind the works are like shifting perceptions, and a decontextualisation caused by internet interference. He conceives photography as a chain of decisions that range from the objects or subject’s staging to post-processing and a potentially final print, creating a space of possibilities and probabilities, primarily enabled via digital post-production.

Albdorf combines classic photographic genres with contemporary visual techniques. His landscapes and still-lifes are boldly aesthetic, but his use of the photographic medium is highly conceptual. Using both analogue and digital technology, Albdorf constructs fictional realities from photographs of persistent visual clichés found online. Albdorf typically submits his constructions to image recognition software to see if the program could be tricked into identifying his fictions as ‘real’.

Deirdre Robb, Belfast Exposed CEO said:

'Thomas Albdorf is a cutting-edge contemporary artist who works challenge us to seek an understanding of reality or fiction. Through new age technologies, combined with objects and scenarios, he is pushing the role of photography and people's expectation of it'.