Preview Invitation | Gareth McConnell – An Illusion | Thursday 19 November

Gareth McConnell’s largest presentation of work to date in an institution to open at Stills Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Gareth McConnell’s work is influenced by the dual experiences of growing up in Northern Ireland / The North of Ireland at the height of The Troubles and coming of age as part of the rave generation in the 1990s. An Illusion at Stills will include works from 1995 to the present day and will be the most extensive presentation of McConnell’s photography at a UK institution to date.

The exhibition will begin with the first comprehensive gallery presentation of Details of Sectarian Murals – a series of abstract photographs made in Northern Ireland between 1997 and 1999 at a time when peace talks involving Unionist and Nationalist political parties was mainstream news. During this period The Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 marked a historic turning point in the three decades of conflict often known as The Troubles, establishing a framework for peace while leaving many of the conflict’s underlying divisions and human legacy unresolved. McConnell took the visual language of tribalism which was ever present on the streets — flags, colours, symbols, weapons and declarations of allegiance — and brought it into extreme close-up, breaking the intended meaning into a constellation of colour, texture and gesture. This rebellious act of decontextualising politicised messages into abstract forms marked the beginnings of a visual strategy which has recurred in different forms throughout his career.

The subcultural dancefloors of the rave era existed in profound tension with the mechanics of sectarian division and this overlapped with the lived experience of The Troubles for an entire generation of youth in the North of Ireland. This formative encounter with the rave scene continues to inform McConnell’s ongoing work, at times finding expression through his use of saturated colour, light and movement.

Included in the exhibition will be The Stop – a recent re-working of photographs made in London during the mass demonstration against the impending invasion of Iraq in February 2003. McConnell intertwines redacted archival images of young demonstrators with more recent flower still lifes. Flowers play a central role in McConnell’s overall body of work, often acting as a memento mori – here they evoke the transience of youth and the fragility of historical moments captured by the camera.

In dialogue with the photographs a new moving-image and sound work will premiere at the exhibition with Stills. The new work reconfigures text and images from McConnell’s 30-year archive and is accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack by Smagghe & Cross.

As a whole, the exhibition looks towards moments of rupture between recent history and its aftermath. It does not attempt to resolve questions but suggests that the act of looking — isolating, reframing and recontextualising — might create a space in which the fixed meanings of political history can begin to dissolve, and other possibilities can be imagined.

Gareth McConnell has been invited to exhibit as Stills prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2027 and is curated by Stills Director Vivienne Gamble as a response to the archive exhibition of Paul Graham, Troubled Land at Stills in 1987. Stills will celebrate its 50th anniversary in Autumn 2027.