The first of its kind, Momentum’s display at Paris Photo will showcase contemporary Irish photography through the work of 5 emerging and established artists – Mandy O’Neill, Shane Lynam, Jan McCullough, Sean Hillen and Alan Butler – who continually challenge and expand the medium beyond its narrative function.
Moving away from “image-as-story”, the selected works engage with process, materiality, and perception, embracing abstraction, fragmentation, and hybrid forms.
This project considers how contemporary Irish practitioners respond to a rapidly shifting visual culture shaped by technology, memory and globalization. Images are layered, deconstructed and reconceptualised, resisting fixed meaning and inviting active interpretation. By emphasizing ambiguity over resolution, these works challenge the expectation that photographs must explain or represent.
Rather than simply reflecting Ireland as a subject, this display demonstrates the diverse concerns of artists working in Ireland today that take abstract and conceptual forms. It offers audiences an immersive experience of Ireland’s evolving photographic voice, one that questions its own limits, expands across disciplines, and redefines how we see, construct, and experience images today.