The family...

A Family of Seven aims to redraw the contemporary lines of photography with a collective intimacy of their individual projects, their stories are ones of physical, metaphorical and challengingly emotional places, embracing the medium of photography in all its constellations and their combined recognition of their photography as its own language. 

 

Like all families, they rely on a home to call their own, the temporality of this place considers the dreams and fantasies they have about our collective lives, homes and underlying realities. The work held within their exhibition and broadening collections blends history, theory, and memoir as it moves between the energy required to make photographs, Proustian reminiscence, critique of our society and confronting political realities that extend into the world at large. Something that all art should be given the space and oxygen to flourish. 

 

In the way any family furnishes their home, may be an unconscious image of their life. In the way they collectively arrange their furniture, frame their pictures, are they dreaming of a liberation for a better world?

 

Through the contemporary and historical, collective thought has transformed the way we see ourselves, and each other. They inspire debate, dissent, revolution. They enlighten, outrage, provoke and confront. They nourish and enrich and radically change the way we see, think and question thought, however noble. It is a place of freedom of expression that this collective is born and builds on its foundations of creating thoughtful and engaging work.

 

The collective’s links were made through their individual time researching toward their postgraduate and doctoral studies, respectfully, at Belfast School of Art, the members all met through their common connection to this place and their time pursuing their academic achievements. After which, they found themselves connected through a common cultural point. Through discourse and finding an equal view on how art is seen outside the institutional environment, this summer sees their first collaborative exhibition Current Disturbances, held at: A Space for Photography, Les Rencontres d’Arles 2023.