EXHIBITIONS 2026
SOUTH CITY
⚲ Botanic Gardens
How was your Dream?
Thaddé Comar
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘How Was Your Dream?’ is a documentary photographic project created during the Hong Kong protests of 2019. The work addresses new forms of demonstration and insurrection in an era shaped by increasingly seamless systems of control.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
Acedia
Louise Desnos
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘Acedia’ reflects on laziness, idleness and introspection as both a personal state and a quiet form of resistance. Through images of stillness, drift and everyday non-events, Louise Desnos explores time, doubt and the fragile line between freedom and melancholy.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
The Journey Home From School
Laura Pannack
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
The Journey Home explores the daily walk to and from school in Cape Town’s gang-governed Cape Flats, where the threat of violence shapes ordinary childhood routines. Made collaboratively with young participants, the work offers an intimate portrait of adolescence, danger and resilience.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
Other Joys
Alice Poyzer
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘Other Joys’ is an ongoing body of work exploring the intensity of special interests through self-portraits, documentary images and constructed scenes. Rooted in Alice Poyzer’s experience as an autistic woman, it becomes both an expression of autistic joy and a call for greater representation.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
Modality
Vahram Aghasyan
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘Modality’ presents Armenian artist Vahram Aghasyan’s images of unfinished Soviet residential buildings suspended within a snow-covered Armenian landscape. Through these incomplete structures, the work reflects on interruption, failed futures and the lingering presence of unrealised social ambition.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
Florida Boys
Josh Aronson
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘Florida Boys’ is a series of staged photographs made across Florida’s backroads between 2020 and 2025. Working with groups of young men in forests, springs and swamps, Josh Aronson explores tenderness, vulnerability and play as alternatives to inherited ideas of masculinity.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
The White Barracks
Lean Lui
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘The White Barracks’ imagines a fictional island inhabited by girl cadets engaged in endless military drills, using allegory to examine power, patriarchy and the reproduction of ideology. Moving between fiction and documentary, Lean Lui asks what might emerge when inherited myths begin to fracture.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
Padre
Marisol Mendez
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘Padre’ is a personal and political excavation of masculinity through a feminist lens, rooted in family history and Latin American experience. Through staged portraits, archival interventions and symbolic gestures, Marisol Mendez traces absence, tenderness, violence and care across generations.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
Beyond the Steppe
Cléa T. Rekhou
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘Beyond the Steppe’ examines the accelerating effects of desertification in the Algerian steppe through the lives of those who depend on and protect the land. Focusing on herders in Laghouat and Djelfa, Cléa T. Rekhou explores resilience, ecological fragility and adaptation in a changing environment.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
Descendants of Summer
Nicola Muirhead
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘Descendants of Summer’ explores identity, belonging and historical reckoning in Bermuda through portraiture, landscape, archives and oral history. Rooted in personal connection and collaborative research, Nicola Muirhead examines how colonialism and slavery continue to shape the island’s present.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
Thinking of a Place
Raghav Goswamy
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
This work explores migration, memory and belonging through family history and a fragmented relationship with place. Returning to Allahabad after years away, Raghav Goswamy traces what remains of inherited journeys through photographs, objects, silences and the shifting landscapes of childhood.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
The Chronicle of Us
Shunta Kimura
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘The Chronicle of Us’ is part of an ongoing documentary project on human migration in the context of the climate crisis. Focusing on South Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, Shunta Kimura brings attention to the lives of people displaced by floods, rising seas and environmental breakdown.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
The Lams of Ludlow Street
Thomas Holton
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘The Lams of Ludlow Street’ is a long-term photographic portrait of a single Chinese American family living in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Over more than two decades, Thomas Holton has used the work to move beyond stereotype and build a deeper understanding of family, identity and belonging.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
The Last Butterflies
Valentina Sinis
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘The Last Butterflies’ follows female Kurdish guerrillas living and training in the mountains between Iraq and Iran, examining militancy, sacrifice and political belief. Moving beyond combat alone, Valentina Sinis looks at how armed struggle intersects with gender, truth, solidarity and survival.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
The Song of Invisible Birds
Florence Goupil
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘The Song of Invisible Birds’ explores the violent pressures facing Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in the Peruvian Amazon. Refusing to photograph those who have chosen not to be seen, Florence Goupil instead traces the lands, signs and surrounding communities shaped by their presence.
⚲ Botanic Gardens
Photo-Book Library
4 - 30 June | 12pm - 6pm
A cultural hub in the heart of Botanic Gardens, the Photo-Book Library celebrates contemporary photography publishing through the 2026 International Open Submission winners. Across ‘Horizons’, it brings together books that move between family, migration, landscape, conflict, identity and imagination, inviting visitors to experience photography slowly, intimately and page by page.
CENTRAL CITY
⚲ Belfast City Hall
One Bed, Two Blankets, Eighty-Five Rules
Sabine Hess and Nicolas Polli
4 - 30 June | Dawn to Dusk
A project in continuous evolution, ‘One Bed, Two Blankets, Eighty-Five Rules’ by Sabine Hess and Nicolas Polli explores the shared rituals, expectations and tensions of a relationship through a set of imagined rules for living together.
⚲ Belfast Exposed
Camera Obsolete?
Belfast Photo Festival
4 - 28 June | Dawn to Dusk
'Camera Obsolete?' is a participatory installation and major public exhibition confronting the collapse of photography’s mechanical era. Conceived and produced by Belfast Photo Festival, audiences are invited to destroy, dismantle, recast or resist the transformation of obsolete cameras into new sculptural forms. Part participation, part spectacle and part material transformation, the exhibition forces questions of authorship, truth and the erosion of photography as a physical, tangible medium.
⚲ Saint Anne’s Square
Still Standing
Belfast Buildings Trust and Joe Laverty
4 - 26 June | Dawn to Dusk
‘Still Standing’ is a collaborative photography project by Belfast Buildings Trust, Belfast Photo Festival and Joe Laverty. Through workshops and photographic walks, young people and older residents looked closely at the places and textures that help define Belfast, asking what they mean now and what they might still become.
⚲ Golden Thread Gallery
Traces of A Traumatic Future
Frédéric Huska
2 May - 20 June | Tues - Fri 11am - 5pm | Sat 11am - 4pm
Traces of a Traumatic Future continues the artist’s sustained inquiry into the unstable ground between visibility and invisibility, past and future, and the political and the intimate.
⚲ Belfast Exposed
Beneath The Surface
Ulster University MFA Photography 2026
4 June - 23 July | Tues - Sat 11am - 5pm
‘Beneath The Surface’ showcases recently graduated artists from the MFA in Photography at Ulster University, bringing together a collective yet deeply personal inquiry into the act of looking.
⚲ Ulster University
BA (Hons) Photography with Video Degree Show
Multiple Artists
5 - 20 June | Mon - Fri 10am - 5pm | Sat 10am - 2pm
New work by graduating artists using photography, video, collage and art therapy to explore themes including place, community, dementia, deepfakes, gender, family trades and fleeting connection.
⚲ Digital Arts Studios
MSC Napoli
Paul McCambridge
24 - 26 June | Wed - Fri 12 - 4pm
This immersive exhibition by Paul McCambridge documents the dismantling of the MSC Napoli at Harland and Wolff through photographic imagery, ambisonic audio and salvaged steel.
⚲ Belfast Print Workshop
Thresholds
Patricia Griffin
4 - 22 June | Mon - Tue 10am - 4pm
‘Thresholds’ is a series of screen monoprints exploring interior space through fragmentation and abstraction. The work moves towards increasingly unstable and uncertain forms, where layered marks and interruptions hold a tension between structure and dissolution, echoing the shifting perceptions of ‘The Passion According to G.H.’
EAST CITY
⚲ QSS Studios & Gallery
The Push and Pull
Katie Moore
30 April - 4 June | Mon - Thurs | 10am - 5pm
Special Openings: 5 & 6 June | 10am - 4pm
‘The Push and Pull’ examines motherhood through time, care and connection. Across a series of intimate works, Katie Moore reflects on the daily rhythms of raising children through moments of closeness, attention and presence.
⚲ QSS Studios & Gallery
TOSS
MIDDEN - Sarah Edmondson, Mary Martin and Niamh McGuinne
25 June - 25 July | Mon - Thurs 10am - 5pm
MIDDEN excavates a fictional virtual midden, combining artefacts, images, text and film to explore destructive cycles of extraction, exploitation, consumption and waste through speculative, deliberately unscientific narratives.
OUTSIDE THE CITY
⚲ Antrim Castle Gardens
Exploring Antrim and Newtownabbey
Evanna Devine
12 - 14 June | 10am - 6pm
‘Exploring Antrim and Newtownabbey’ is a year-round project unfolding across the four seasons through four commissions and a public photography competition. Beginning with Evanna Devine in spring, it invites audiences to discover the borough’s landscapes, heritage and history in fresh ways, ready for the competition launch in August 2026.
⚲ Gortfoyle Business Centre, Derry / Londonderry
If It Hadn’t Rained
Michael McGinley
28 - 30 May | 10am - 4pm
‘If It Hadn’t Rained’ is a one-off exhibition by Derry-born artist Michael McGinley, produced by Mary Carson in collaboration with the Willie Carson Collection. Rooted in the city’s streets, people and contested histories, the project explores memory, photographic truth and the unstable boundary between document and fabrication.