Featured Image by Zoe Hamill
PhotoIreland announces the 5 Irish and UK artists selected to join the FUTURES Photography Platform in 2025. They are: Henri Kisielewski, Nazlı Yıldırım, Shane Hynan, Tudor Rhys Etchells, and Zoe Hamill. The five artists were selected from a high number of submissions, the largest and broadest to date, which underlines artists’ appreciation of FUTURES as a substantial career development opportunity.
In selecting artists for opportunities such as New Irish Works, RADAR, RELAY and FUTURES, PhotoIreland believes it is important to employ a variety of approaches that ensures transparent and informed decisions, expanding the team’s knowledge of the discipline with that of other art professionals from Ireland and abroad. For their contribution to the process, we are very thankful to the invited jury Mariama Attah, Associate Curator, Deutsche Börse, Julia Bunnemann, Curator, Photoworks, and Ciara Hickey, Co-Director, Household.
In joining the platform, now in its 8th year, the artists not only enter a growing list of talent from across Europe, but also benefit from a growing range of opportunities supported by Creative Europe and the 22 current platform members planned throughout the present year, culminating in an annual networking event at the Tbilisi Photo Festival. You can discover more about each artist in the introduction texts below.
Henri Kisielewski is a self-taught French-British photographer based in London. His work addresses the relationship between images to the real world – broadly speaking he makes photographs about photography.
Research-led and informed by his studies in human geography, Henri’s work explores themes of memory, photographic representation and the porous boundary between fact and fiction in documentary media.
Working primarily with medium format film and allowing room for chance, Henri’s practice is characterised by a documentary approach based on a conceptual framework. He has developed long-term projects in France, the UK, Iceland, Morocco and Portugal, among others.
Henri is currently working on a new ambitious and multi-faceted project in New York State: a collective portrait of Agloe, a fictional town that came to exist in the real world. Through a variety of visual strategies – photographs, archive images, video interviews – the work probes the ‘documentary’ image in a post-truth era.
Images from Agloe
Nazlı Yıldırım
Nazlı Yıldırım was born in Ankara and is living in Ireland. She studied at Istanbul University Faculty of Letters. After teaching for a while, she worked as an editor in the publishing industry. Nazlı’s articles have been published in various magazines, newspapers and online platforms in Greece, Belgium and Turkey.
Nazlı released her first photo fanzine called Hayret. Her creative journey involves documenting the impact of factors like class, culture, gender, sexual identity, and family dynamics on societies. Through the lens of her own life, she delves into subjects such as gender, cultural identity, discrimination, and the experiences of LGBTI+ communities.
Images from Look At Me! Who Am I?.
Irish artist Shane Hynan holds an MFA in Photography (Ulster University, 2019). His practice centres on photography with experimental elements in sound, video, collage, and sculpture. The metaphorical exploration of place, land and architecture is a significant subtext throughout his work.
He draws upon conceptual, performative and subjective documentary approaches and works primarily with analogue photography processes as it enhances an emotional and intuitive connection with landscape and topography.
He has shown his work extensively in Ireland and received multiple awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Creative Ireland, and Kildare Arts. He has exhibited internationally in China, Germany, and the UK, and was shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society IPE162, IPE163 and IPE166. In 2024 he undertook residencies at the Centre Culturel Irlandais (Paris, France), and at the Roscommon Arts Centre (Roscommon, Ireland).
Images from Beneath | Beofhód.
Tudor Rhys Etchells uses the photograph to challenge fictions created by legal systems. Working within such a bureaucracy in his previous role as a human rights lawyer inspires his closeness to the document and the brutally mundane. For him, the photographic medium, with its own cumbersome structures of viewing and representing, appears the best match for understanding processes that construct the imagined norms of our society. Embracing photography’s performative element, he deconstructs our conceptions of visual knowledge.
He achieved a Distinction in MA Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales during which he was awarded the Reginald Salisbury grant. Recently he was awarded an Arts Council of Wales Research and Development grant to fund a residency and his first solo exhibition at BayArt, Cardiff.
He is based in Cardiff and an associate artist of BayArt gallery.
Images from Available Potential Guaranteed.
Zoe is a photographer from Co. Antrim, now living in Edinburgh. She co-founded the Belfast Photo Factory, a photography collective providing equipment and support for emerging photographers.
Zoe is interested in the relationship between humans and the environment, as well as the systems of classification that we use to make sense of the world around us. She works on long term photographic projects, drawing on scientific and historic research as well as lived experience to tell a story about a place or subject. Her background research has been informed by photography’s history as a tool of imperialism and this is something that she works to recognise and subvert within her photographic practice.
She currently teaches the Stills School, an alternative education programme for young people and is a visiting lecturer at Queen Margaret University. She has received funding from Edinburgh City Council and the Richard & Siobhan Coward Foundation
Zoe participated in New Irish Works III between 2019 and 2021, and published the TLP Edition ‘Tony’s Pony’s‘ in 2021.
Images from Primary Succession.
PhotoIreland and Futures
Futures Photography Platform is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, and PhotoIreland is the Irish partner of the platform.
Since 2017, PhotoIreland is the Irish member of the European Platform of Photography Futures, alongside currently 22 other partner organisations. Futures organises a series of events across Europe within each of its member countries. The aim of the platform is to pool the resources and talent programmes of leading photography institutions across Europe in order to increase the capacity, mobility and visibility of its selected artists. All participant members of the platform put forward every year 5 artists to be promoted nationally, and that alongside all the other selected artists gather at the annual Futures event — previously held at Unseen Amsterdam and in an online festival RESET last year. It is there where they enjoy a series of professional development events conceived to further their careers and promote their work. The artists are also promoted online, in print, participate in awards, and enjoy a profile page on the Futures website. You can visit these at futures-photography.com/artists
Aside from the 5 artists announced above, PhotoIreland has put forward 30 artists in previous years, selected through direct invitation and an open call: Aindreas Scholz, Aisling McCoy, Aoife Herrity, Audrey Gillespie, Barry W Hughes, Becks Butler, Berta Mars, Chris Finnegan, Cian Burke, Ciaran Óg Arnold, Clare Lyons, Debbie Castro, Dorje de Burgh, Emilia Rigaud, Emma O’Brien, Garry Loughlin, George Voronov, Jamin Keogh, Jialin Long, Leon Nevill Gallagher, Mark Duffy, Mark McGuinness, Megan Doherty, Miriam O’ Connor, Niamh Barry, Patrick O’Byrne, Pauline Rowan, Phelim Hoey, Róisín White, Ronan McCall, Ryan Allen, Sarah Navan, Shia Conlon, Vera Ryklova, and Yvette Monahan.
The current members of the platform are Bienal Fotografia do Porto (PT), CAMERA (IT), Centre de la photographie Genève (CE), Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie (FR), Copenhagen Photo Festival (DK), Der Greif (DE), FOMU (BE), FOTODOK (NL), Fotofestiwal Lodz (PL), Fotogalleriet (NO), Fotograf Zone (CZ), ISSP (LV), Odesa Photo Days (UA), Organ Vida (CR), Photo Elysée (CH), Photoforum (CH), PhotoIreland (IE), Photo Romania Festival (RO), Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Centre (HU), Tbilisi Photo Festival (GE), Triennial of Photography Hamburg (DE), and Void (GR).
Futures is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Find out more about Futures Photography at futures-photography.com
![Hello all! I’m Jake Hughes, a photographer from County Armagh, and welcome to my Instagram takeover for PhotoIreland! I recently graduated with a BA in Photography and Video from Ulster University in Belfast, and I’m grateful to have been selected for the RADAR residency.
My work explores my experience with obsessive compulsive disorder, focusing on familiar environments like my hometown, Keady—a small village near the Northern Irish border. Through my images, I examine the connection between place and comfort, documenting spaces that feel uninhabited and isolated. These locations reflect the way overthinking affects me, showing how certain places can reinforce anxiety rather than soothe it.
Over the next few posts, I’ll be sharing my graduate exhibition, ‘The Destructive Comfort of a Thinking Machine’. I’ll walk you through the photobook, the displayed images, my creative process, and the photobooks I made before this one.
Project Statement:
“To establish my own connection between existence and comfort, I observe my hometown, Keady, through a fictionalised lens—reflecting on how obsessive-compulsive disorder shapes my thinking. I found myself becoming too comfortable in an imagined reality, and the decay of this place made me feel like I was aging alongside it. The only way to escape was to recognise nature’s power to adapt and restore, helping me see myself as part of that process.”
All images shown are from ‘The Destructive Comfort of a Thinking Machine’ (2024).
[This post is part of a series of RADAR Artist takeovers. The current takeover is by artist Jake Hughes]](https://photoireland.org/apps/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)
