Re-presenting Representations of Representation: Revisited

Belfast Exposed is delighted to present ‘Re-presenting representations of representation: Revisited’ explores the history of performance art through the lens of its documentation. Rather than presenting performance as a fixed or singular event, Peter Richards asks a fundamental question: do we know performance art itself, or do we know its images?

This work is particularly significant for Belfast Exposed as it speaks directly to the organisation’s long-term commitment to photography as both a documentary tool and a critical medium. Peter Richards’ practice interrogates the role of photographic images in shaping cultural memory, asking how histories are formed, mediated and sustained questions that sit at the core of Belfast Exposed’s archive, exhibition and research programmes.

Re-presenting representations of representation: Revisited aligns closely with Belfast Exposed’s ongoing transformation of its archive from a storage-based resource into an active, interrogative space. Rather than treating photography as neutral evidence, Richards’ work foregrounds the complexities of photographic mediation, echoing Belfast Exposed’s ethos of encouraging audiences to look critically at images and the systems through which they circulate.

The exhibition also reflects Belfast Exposed’s commitment to presenting work that bridges live practice, participation and photographic process. By involving audiences in acts of re-enactment and documentation, the work reinforces Belfast Exposed’s focus on engagement, learning and co-production, while expanding conversations around what constitutes an archive—positioning it as a living record of experience rather than a fixed historical account.

Finally, the exhibition strengthens Belfast Exposed’s role as a space for critical reflection on photographic histories, supporting its strategic aims around archive development, sustainability and cultural tourism by presenting intellectually rigorous work that connects local audiences to wider international debates on photography, performance and memory.

First begun in 1996 and developed over more than a decade, this long-term project re-examines seminal moments in performance art by reconstructing their most recognisable photographic representations. Working with audiences, Richard’s re-stages these mediated images using site-specific pinhole cameras and camera obscura, transforming acts of documentation into live, participatory events. In some instances, viewers experience the work from inside the camera; in others, they become performers themselves, embodying figures drawn from the canon of performance art history.

The resulting images do not document the original performances, nor do they attempt to recreate them faithfully. Instead, they examine how performance has been recorded, circulated and understood through publications and photographic archives. By foregrounding mediation, repetition and re-enactment, Richards challenges the idea of performance art as a linear or stable history.

Rather than offering definitive answers, the exhibition invites reflection on how histories are constructed, remembered and believed and how images, more than events themselves, often shape our understanding of the past.

Both solo exhibitions by Peter Richards and Trish Morrissey are rooted in a shared engagement with the archive, not as a static repository of the past but as a living, unstable space shaped by memory, mediation and interpretation. While Richards interrogates how performance art histories are constructed through photographic documentation and publication, Morrissey turns her attention to the physical and psychological experience of the archive itself its structures, systems and silences.

Together, the exhibitions ask how images come to stand in for events, lives and histories, and how meaning is produced through acts of selection, storage and retrieval. Each artist exposes the archive as a site of power and subjectivity, revealing what is preserved, what is overlooked, and how institutional frameworks shape our understanding of the past. Presented in dialogue, these two bodies of work reflect Belfast Exposed’s evolving approach to its own archive: positioning it not simply as a resource to be accessed, but as material to be questioned, reimagined and reactivated through contemporary artistic practice.

Peter Richards Interview

About Peter Richards

Peter Richards is a Welsh-born Irish artist and curator based in Belfast. His practice spans performance, video, installation and photography, with a longstanding focus on the documentation, mediation and re-presentation of live art. Beginning his career working primarily in performance and time-based practices, Richards has consistently questioned how artistic actions are recorded, remembered and historicised.

Since the mid-1990s, his work has engaged critically with the histories of performance art, particularly the role of photography and publication in shaping how these histories are understood. His long-term project Re-presenting representations of representation (1996–2008) exemplifies this approach, using pinhole photography, audience participation and re-enactment to explore the relationship between live events and their mediated afterlives.

Alongside his artistic practice, Richards has worked extensively as a curator, contributing to the development of contemporary art discourse in Northern Ireland and beyond. He has lived and worked in Belfast since 1994.