If you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Northern Ireland is the worst place to live, in terms of rights, in the whole of the UK or Ireland. Fundamental rights that exist throughout Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales do not exist in the North. Over the past decade homophobic hate crimes have increased year on year, and specific legislation for trans hate crimes is absence. When all of these are mixed in with the melting pot conservative ideologies, such as creationism, that still exist in Northern Ireland, it results in an atmosphere unconducive to the LGBTQ+ community. It is this community,…

Celestograph by August Strindberg, 1894. Image kindly provided by the National Library of Sweden Outside of his native Sweden August Strindberg is predominantly known as a playwright and a poet, such was the high regard his was held in within these disciplines. Strindberg was in fact a polymath who explored painting (he was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin) and the photographic arts. It is the latter, and specifically his late 19th Century experiments in capturing he might sky, that severs as the departure point for Observations, the current show in Belfast Exposed. For his ‘Celestographs’, Strindberg placed sensitised plates…

This week is the last to the Memorabilia exhibition in Belfast Exposed – closing this Saturday August 19th. Gábor Arion Kudász, son of Hungarian artist Emese Kudász, began photographing and documenting his mother’s archive in the years that followed her death in 2010. Gábor’s cataloguing of his mother’s work threw up a interesting observation – is the coherence between objects one that existed prior to his undertaking of the task? Or is it one generated through the creation of an archive? What is for certain is the context these works were created in is separate to the context they are placed under when…