Now in its 12th year, the PhotoIreland Festival kicks off on July 2nd

The PhotoIreland Festival commences its twelfth year, with a month-long event entitled bite the hand that feeds you.

Centring around the theme of food, the festival looks at eating – or not eating – as acts of survival, comfort and protest, as well as exploring tech, climate change and migration across exhibitions, talks, performances and artistic twists on the live cooking channel format. 

Taking its cue from current conflicts and affairs, the festival generates a discussion around complex social and global issues, with topics ranging from hospitality to colonisation, from hunger to overconsumption, trauma to technology, ethics to ideologies, to sustainability, and even surveillance capitalism.

The programme does not claim to give a solution to all the complex issues surrounding food but to put forth questions and considerations towards conscious and informed consumption.

Curator Julia Gelezova has put together a line up of traditional and contemporary lens-based works, alongside film and performance, from the likes of Alan Phelan, Amanda Nyoni, Deirdre O’Mahony, Fiona Hallinan, Jennie Moran, Róisín White, alongside international artists like Gê Viana, Hans van der Meer, Dániel Szalai and Ana Nuñez Rodriguez.

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Conceived in 2008, and celebrating its first edition in 2010, PhotoIreland Festival is Ireland’s first international festival of photography and image culture, and the main festival dedicated to Photography in Ireland. It celebrates Ireland’s photographic talents – oftentimes only recognised abroad – as well as bringing international practitioners and artists to Ireland. The festival highlights, promotes, and elevates photography in Ireland – conferring on it the importance it duly deserves. With the motto “vibrant, friendly, all-inclusive: a festival for all to enjoy”, we set out to raise awareness on local and international photographers and artists working with photography and to underline the work of those organisations and individuals that for years have been promoting an engagement with the medium.

PhotoIreland Festival kicks off online from 6pm on July 2nd and runs until July 31st, several events are online with others held in-person at Rathfarnham Castle, The Library Room and Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar, for more information visit the website.

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