Belfast Photo Festival 2024

Capturing wide appeal through popular culture, Belfast Photo Festival aims to instill and inspire public enjoyment, participation, positive social and environmental impact.

Overview

Belfast Photo Festival is a charitable organisation that hosts an annual event at diverse locations citywide. They catalyse local debate, creative development and financial opportunities with a combination of commissions, entrepreneurship and global arts leadership. The festival is proud of its 13 year longevity, resilience, innovation and adaptation across arts and public engagement. Built on a track record and reputation of reaching and positively impacting numerous and diverse, national and international audiences.

Belfast Photo Festival is the UK and Ireland's largest annual festival of photography and attracts upwards of 100 thousand physical visitors a year. It celebrates the finest national and international contemporary photography across Northern Ireland’s museums, galleries and public spaces. Capturing wide appeal through popular culture, accessible themes and unexpected encounters with engaging photography, the festival aims to instil and inspire public enjoyment,  participation, positive social and environmental impact by utilising the most accessible of artistic mediums and bringing it to both established and new audiences.

Since 2011, the organisation has hosted a Festival every year in Belfast, varying the theme, scale, reach, form, and venue partners to maximise its resources and reach. Since 2014 it has grown responsibly in turnover and governance. Already supported by core investment, staff, and capacity growth, 2024 will see the organisation launch our 10th, largest, and most ambitious edition yet with additional project funding and commissioning to enable us to increase our participation, social impact and evaluations.

The 10th edition will delve into how contemporary photographers are interpreting rapid digitalisation, our climate emergency and the ethical questions surrounding Artificial Intelligence. Divergence embraces the complexity of our polarised world, shining a light on the importance of nuance, critical thought, and interpretation, while offering antidotes for survival. 

Among the displayed works, SMILE AI. by Mattais Oostrik is a tech-art installation that immerses its audience into a dystopian future where reality is refracted through the lens of AI's statistical interpretations. Under the theme "Oops! We Automated Bullshit” SMILE AI. transforms portraits of its visitors into flawless, super-persuasive replicas, eerily smiling back at the audience. Broken Spectre is Richard Mosse’s most ambitious project to date and an Isle of Ireland premiere. Taking you deep into the Brazilian Amazon, the immersive 74 min piece is presented as a bespoke video installation including a 20m wide screen and 16-channel sound. Our Streets are full of White Bears by Barbara Caillot and Aleksandra Karkowska explores why people are so eager to take photos with a white bear, wondering what is mythical, magical and universal about it that everyone has a photo with it.

Other exhibiting artists are Kourtney Roy, Amin Yousefi, Adam Rouhana, Maggie Shannon, Chloé Milos Azzopardi, Laura Pannack, Aaryan Sinha, Arnau Blanch Vilageliu, Juan Brenner and Youqine Lefèvre.