Running for over 15 years, the BJP International Photography Award discovers the best in contemporary talent around the world, as selected by a prestigious jury of curators, editors, and directors from leading institutions. This year, in the Single Image Show, 20 images by 17 artists, are on view at Seen Fifteen.

The BJP International Photography Award takes the temperature of society through images. With the depletion of natural resources and increasing political divisions across societies, we must find a way to come together. The latest winning images celebrate the nuances of our identities, community and spirituality, from Malawi to Wales to Bermuda, united under one roof.

Seen Fifteen is delighted to announce the first London solo show for Belfast-based multi-disciplinary artist, Audrey Gillespie. The exhibition is the third in the curatorial series, The Troubles Generation – a project which invites Northern Irish artists to present work which sheds new light on the legacy of living in the shadow of the 30 year civil conflict known as The Troubles. The Troubles Generation series began with solo exhibitions by Martin Seeds and Gareth McConnell, two artists who were brought up at the height of the violence in the 1970s and 1980s. With Audrey Gillespie, the project turns to a new generation born at the time when the signing of the Good Friday Agreement officially brought the conflict to a close.

Audrey Gillespie will present a new iteration of an evolving, diaristic body of work titled, This Hurts. A graduate of Fine Art at Belfast School of Art, Gillespie’s practice incorporates analogue photography, painting, illustration and screen printing. This Hurts, when presented in the gallery, takes the form of an artistic ‘mind map’ reflecting upon both the personal concerns of the artist and the wider LGBTQ+ community in Northern Ireland. As a society traditionally steeped in extreme religious rhetoric, Northern Ireland has been slow to respond to the urgent human rights issues of the 21st century and was the last area of the United Kingdom to legalise same-sex marriage in 2020.

This Hurts explores contemporary themes of queerness, mortality, youth and anxiety against the backdrop of a post-Troubles world. Through a mix of photography, painting and written musings, Gillespie invites us into a nocturnal world that creates a palpable tension between the dreamlike and the nightmarish. Blurred and double-exposed photographs conjure warm, cinematic nostalgia whilst the recurring motifs of painted rats and singular eyes nod towards a darker, pervading anxiety in the atmosphere.

“There is a rawness to her imagery, reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s portraits of the New York scene, fused with Davide Sorrenti’s stylised hue. She captures her subjects through hazy, unpolished 35mm film, often layered one on top of another, with the distorted lights of the outside world seeping into frame. From unearthly images of angels at night, to everyday encounters with friends, this series captures and subsequently invites the viewer to consider the vibrant – and often turbulent – lives of queer youth in Northern Ireland” Donal Talbot for Over Journal, Volume 2

“Sometimes it seems in Northern Ireland, that the fiercer the town, the more flamboyant the hanging baskets of flowers. Carrick has lots of them, swinging in the north wind”

Susan McKay, Carrickfergus, Source Magazine (2001)

Seen Fifteen is delighted to announce a solo show with Gareth McConnell as the next exhibition in the ongoing series, The Troubles Generation – a curatorial project which invites artists who grew up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles to shed new light on the impact of being brought up in an era of intense sectarian violence.

The title for the show, The Brighter the Flowers, The Fiercer the Town, is taken from an essay written by Susan McKay about McConnell’s early-career documentary series entitled Portraits & Interiors from The Albert Bar (1999), photographed in a loyalist bar in his hometown of Carrickfergus during the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement.

For this exhibition, McConnell positions the flower as a central motif. He invites the viewer to partake in a journey inspired by formative embodied experiences that oscillate between raves and funeral processions to present a disparate world of visual references made comprehensible using his signature hallucinogenic language.

“McConnell’s flowers. Coloured shadows. Slippage. De-registration. Screaming colour. Narcissistic, posturing, pop star tight-balls-trousers colours. Synaesthesia colours and intimate human perfumes. Vertiginous planes of colour as seen by the industrious bee on his or her daily commute to the flower convenience store. The engorged take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me flower colours of sex. An explosion of petals in a Northern Ireland flower stall, many people brought to violent orgasm. Pleasure. Total. The floral. McConnell your florist”

Neal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022

The Brighter The Flowers, The Fiercer The Town is the second in a series of exhibitions at Seen Fifteen as part of the wider project, The Troubles Generation, generously supported by the Genesis Kickstart Fund. Looking ahead to a significant future moment in UK and Irish history with the 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement in 2023, the project seeks to examine the legacy of The Troubles from the viewpoint of artists born into its divided society and with lived experience of growing up during the conflict. Taking a phased approach to developing photographic projects and new writing, the ultimate ambition is to create a large-scale touring exhibition in 2023. Artists exhibiting at Seen Fifteen include Martin Seeds, Gareth McConnell and Audrey Gillespie.

Seen Fifteen is delighted to announce a solo show of new works by Northern Irish artist, Martin Seeds. The exhibition, No Country For Young Men, also marks the beginning of a long-term curatorial project at the gallery, The Troubles Generation, which will unfold in chapters over the coming 12 months, generously supported by the Genesis Kickstart Fund.

Martin Seeds (born in Belfast) dedicates his artistic practice to an ongoing examination of Northern Irish identity, politics and place. He employs differing modes of experimentation with photographic process as a means of encouraging us to reconsider the image and look again. No Country For Young Men looks back, via appropriation, at a series of found portraits in a Belfast school yearbook from 1965. This was a time, a few years before the civil conflict known as “The Troubles” started, when political tensions in Northern Ireland were rising and trouble was brewing. Seeds’ act of appropriation places these 1960s school portraits into our current moment, and from our historical vantage point asks us to consider how individual lives in Northern Ireland were affected by the backdrop of a violent conflict that would last for 30 years.

“What will become of these boys, their youth and their fragile aspirations, as the shadow of history falls across their lives? It is not just the past that is hauntingly present in these humble portraits, but the looming, uncertain, tumultuous future”

Sean O’Hagan

No Country For Young Men is the first in a new series of exhibitions and events that will take place at Seen Fifteen as part of a wider project, The Troubles Generation. Looking ahead to a significant future moment in UK and Irish history with the 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement in 2023, the project seeks to examine the legacy of The Troubles from the viewpoint of artists born into its divided society and with lived experience of growing up during the conflict. Taking a phased approach to developing photographic projects and new writing, the ultimate ambition is to create a large-scale touring exhibition in 2023.