Exhibition Review: Belfast Photo Festival
I See You © Kensuke Koike & Thomas Sauvin
Written by: Alyssa Monte
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, Belfast Photo Festival 2021 tackles a variety of poignant issues such as climate change, advancement of technology, government surveillance and the power of protest. The festival’s theme “Future(s)” engages audiences with public art installations around the city that provoke a critical question — “What kind of world do we want to create?”
Broken down into four categories for each respective week of June, the festival calls attention to “Environmental Future(s),” “Social Future(s),” “Photographic Future(s)” and “Technological Future(s).” The pieces included in each category represent broad issues that the individual artists feel connected to.
Shroud © Simon Norfolk & Klaus Thymann.
“Shroud,” by Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann, spotlights the human attempt to preserve Earth in the wake of global warming. Illustrating the “Environmental Future(s)” category, this piece was made in response to Swiss entrepreneurs wrapping a significant section of a glacier in a thermal blanket in hopes of preserving it. Illuminating the financial forces that drive such an experiment, this installation begs the audience to consider both the role and the impact of community action. The title “Shroud” refers to the melting glacier under its death cloak.
Stepping on the Ant Bed © Davion Alston
Davion Alston represents the “Social Future(s)” category with “Stepping on the Ant Bed.” His photographic series documents the 2020 protests against police brutality. The colored stickers covering the faces of protesters protect their identity, while also alluding to the use of face masks, giving the series a subtle timestamp. “The goal is to identify an envisioned sense of utopia through the chaos while also identifying and executing with a collective consciousness, to add pressure like stepping onto an ant bed,” Alston said on the festival’s website.
Event Horizon © Quentin Lacombe
Quentin Lacombe merges photography, science and fiction together in his piece “Event Horizon,” embodying the “Photographic Future(s)” category. Lacombe’s work attempts to create cosmology through photography. In this piece, he displays an endless timeline of different entities with the intentional lack of humans. Through collected images made in various observation sites, he lays the foundations of a fictional universe.
The last category, “Technological Future(s),” reflects an era of surveillance and conspiracy. “I See You” is a collaborative piece by Kensuke Koike and Thomas Sauvin. Koike, who combines collage with found photography, deconstructed and invented new imagery based off an album that Sauvin acquired in the 1980s from an unknown Shanghai University photography student. Koike gave this work a new life with a simple blade and adhesive tape. The piece, largely wrapped around a building, is reminiscent of George Orwell's “Big Brother” as it watches over the city.
Plastic Planet © Mandy Barker
Each piece included in this festival is strategically placed to reflect the issues at hand and trigger a reaction. Together, they paint an intricate web of possible futures for the audience to weigh and explore.
Belfast Photo Festival is running until June 30. You can learn more about the works here.
