Smash a camera, make an artwork: Belfast Photo Festival unveils cathartic ‘rage room’

Visitors to this year’s Belfast Photo Festival are guaranteed a smashing time as the event features a dedicated ‘rage room’.

One of the standout highlights of this year’s festival is Camera Obsolete?, a participatory exhibition at Belfast Exposed where visitors are invited to transform old cameras into new sculptural forms in a process that organisers say is both cathartic and considered.

Visitors are invited to destroy, dismantle, repair or recast obsolete cameras in a moment that confronts the collapse of photography’s mechanical era.

Participants can wield hammers in a dedicated rage room or use precise tools to prise apart the supplied cameras in disassembly areas, before gathering, sorting, experimenting and reworking the mechanical fragments into new artworks.

The resulting objects will be displayed in the gallery throughout the festival, which runs from June 4-30.

The festival’s director of development Toby Smith said: “We live in a culture saturated with AI-generated and synthetic imagery. The question now is not simply what a photograph looks like, but who made it, what machine made it, and whether it can still be trusted.

“Camera Obsolete? is designed to confront audiences with the pleasure, discomfort and contradiction of destroying physical cameras, a choice many creatives now make silently and privately when choosing to prompt images instead of making them.”

This year’s festival arrives under the theme ‘Horizons’, a concept that invites artists and audiences to consider what lies beyond our current technological, environmental, social, economic and geopolitical boundaries.

The festival’s CEO Michael Weir said: “We want people to experience photography in new and unexpected ways through accessible, free exhibitions across the city, whether that means gaining inspiration on a lunchtime break or engaging with our new participatory installation.

“Belfast Photo Festival is committed to championing photography, homegrown artistic talent and global voices alike.”

Among this year’s featured artists are Thaddé Comar, whose project How was your dream?, addresses new forms of demonstration and insurrection in a documentary series created during the Hong Kong protests of 2019; and Vahram Aghasyan, whose project Modality, reflects on failed futures and the lingering presence of unrealised social ambition in a series that captures images of unfinished Soviet residences suspended in the Armenian landscape.

The festival’s long-running Open Submission once again provides an international platform for emerging artists. Selected by a jury including curators from MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, TIME, and Vogue, this year’s winners feature in a large-scale, open-air exhibition in the city’s scenic Botanic Gardens.

This year’s festival also has a distinct Northern Irish flavour with work by veteran photographer Paul McCambridge showcased alongside other emerging artists from the island of Ireland and those who now call this place home.

At Digital Art Studios, MSC Napoli by McCambridge documents the dismantling of the former container ship that was deliberately beached in 2007 to avoid environmental disaster after sustaining damage.

Exactly 100 years after work began on the Titanic, the hull was brought to Harland and Wolff for decontamination and dismantling, marking a striking shift from maritime construction to industrial deconstruction.

For more information, visit belfastphotofestival.com