Futures: Made in Europe

It is a challenge to narrow all of a country’s talented practitioners into five individuals, but identifying five artists that represent the diversity of practices is an undertaking that members of the Futures Photography Platform like to take on.

Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, Futures pools together the resources and talent programmes of leading photography institutions across Europe, in order to increase capacity, mobility, and visibility of its selected artists. By bringing together a wealth of resources and curatorial expertise, each talent selected by the Futures members gains access to an unprecedented network of professionals, markets and audiences.

PhotoIreland, the Irish member of the platform, is interested in putting forward artists that have demonstrated experimentation with the medium, appreciating those practices that engage with poignant socio-political issues creatively, with defined narratives and personal visual vocabularies. In the selection, special importance is placed on their career stage, as one of the aims of PhotoIreland is to facilitate extra support in establishing international connections and expanding their networks and, in short, helping professionalise their practice. For the previous editions, PhotoIreland nominated Aisling McCoy, Barry W Hughes, Ciaran Óg Arnold, Dorje de Burgh, George Voronov, Jamin Keogh, Megan Doherty, Miriam O’ Connor, Róisín White, and Yvette Monahan. Now, on the following pages, you will discover the works of the five Irish artists, nominated in 2020.

Becks Butler

Becks Butler has a career in commercial and contemporary photography as well as a visual arts curatorial practice. Coming from a familial and career focused background in agriculture, Butler has developed an interest in merging that background with her practice. Prior to her studies in Fine Art and Photography, she completed a degree in Agricultural Science. Butler has first-hand experience of the physical and mental challenges of agricultural labour. In both agricultural and artistic practices it is often difficult to draw a line between work and life, and she has developed an interest in the performance of labour inherent in both industries. In her current project Loopies Field, which investigates a modern image of agriculture in Ireland, she is interested in dedication to labour exploring notions of inheritance, architecture, economy, relationship to the production of agriculture, and the effects of industry on the environment.

Garry Loughlin

Garry Loughlin is a contemporary photographer, whose practice consists of documentary, investigative projects, as well as more meditative, observational work, such as his best known work Between Spaces. For Futures, he presents his latest project The Clearing House, an investigation into speculation and evidence (or lack thereof), told through the story of an expelled Russian diplomat from Ireland. The project is a multi-layered narrative of Loughlin ’s own photographs and archival materials, weaving a semi-fictional story of the diplomat’s activities in a specific region of Ireland, with the photographer filling the gaps in the story with his own observations, conclusions, and speculations. While searching for hints of the border’s presence, the work also casts light upon the insignificance of such lines to those with power.

Shia Conlon

Shia Conlon is a prolific artist, working between Ireland and Finland, with an oeuvre that experiments with photography, film, text, sculpture, and video, at times using bold and provocative visual language. Much of their work has been centered around marginalised voices and growing up in the landscape of working class Catholic Ireland. In their past work, Conlon used pop-culture references, utilising the online platform with Bunny—a collective founded by Conlon—as well as producing zines, using these seemingly non-cultural or mass-culture tools to communicate with a wider, contemporary arts audience. Conlon’s latest work, Against Domestication, is an examination of power structures and how they take shape of gender, sexuality, religion, the family, and the state. Conlon imagined the project as a form in which to explore the rewriting of trauma, wanting to revisit these photographic memories or sites of trauma via restagings. The resulting images act as a language to communicate the otherwise ineffable. So often trauma takes away the inability to articulate, and memories become obscured. The act of speaking, making a language, post-trauma, is political.

Mark McGuinness

After working as a freelance commercial assistant, Mark McGuinness began focusing on long term personal projects, and in 2018 started an MA in Photography at Aalto University School of Arts, Design, and Architecture in Helsinki. His current project is focused on 19th century colonial activities in Ireland, particularly the mapping of Ireland, and the affects these activities had on Irish cultural identity and representation. At the beginning of the 19th century, one of the most significant acts of modern colonisation began; the mapping of the entire British Empire. Using the island of Ireland as a testing ground for their tools and methodology, a specially created group from the British military, known as the Ordnance Survey began the largest and most comprehensive cartographical undertaking the world has ever seen. McGuinness followed a map which listed the original triangulation points used to create the first OS map of the island of Ireland. This construction mirrors the work of the OS but acts as a counter-balance to their subjective interpretation of the land.

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Vera Ryklova

Vera Ryklova ’s work is rooted in performance and expressed through photography, reminiscent of some pioneering visual artists such as Sarah Lucas or Sherman. In her images, she role-plays, transforms into, and invades alternate personas, weaving elements of her own past and present into the frame. Her work is clever and at times even humorous and awkward, but always remaining intimate and tender. Although she has a number of projects in her oeuvre, it is all rooted in topics of identity and societal expectations, self-fulfilment and contentment. One could really view her whole practice as one large project with various chapters. Ryklova explores both the social construction of the self and the self- concept. Through the medium, her own body, and using her own experience in engaging existing society, she mirrors its norms as they define a single life. In her work, Ryklova explores desire and the sense of self within the concept of social and cultural belonging.