Each year, the festival offer a high visibility for two European structures dedicated to the visual arts. This year’s invited school is the Belfast School of Art, University of Ulster (Ireland) . The school’s guests are two Irish photographers : Aisling Kane and Jan McCullough.
. Aisling Kane, Virgin Territory
This work is about the place where I grew up. Feeling like it was constantly misrepresented in the media, I decided I wanted to show a more personal viewpoint of the people from the area. I looked at the parallel narratives that run alongside political issues which get the majority of press coverage. I felt that it was important for me to show the other side of the story, the home life, the new life, those presently growing up in the area and those who spent all their life there. I wanted to show the people and the issues that have everything to do with a working class area and nothing to do with a sectarian divide. Initially I was inspired by the work of Dutch and Flemish painters such as Johannes Vermeer who depicted his subjects in interior spaces bathed in natural light. Through photographing my subjects I began to see similarities in their lives and the insights into the everyday in James Joyce’s The Dubliners. Joyce brought the inconsequential actions of his commonplace subjects into significance. With this in mind I placed the everyday lives of my subjects on a platform and made the unimportant precious.
. Jan McCullough, Portrait as a Building
Comparing a person with a structure as an apparatus of representation, ‘Portrait as a Building’ is a photographic examination of a person’s internal state. Photography is a mechanism for showing things, a device for exposing, yet it is limited in its capacity for description. Shown here is the sculptural equivalent of a person: an exploration of the precarious assemblage that forms private life. Thus the building reveals a more accurate representation than a man’s image on its own.
http://www.behance.net/AislingKane
http://www.janmccullough.co.uk/
