Artist and photography lecturer Martin Seeds has a solo exhibition at London gallery, Seen Fifteen (4-21 November), supported by the School of Art & Media, Research and Knowledge Exchange Funding.

The exhibition opens 4 November and runs until 21 November 2021.

Seen Fifteen Gallery
Martin Seeds artist portfolio

Seen Fifteen Gallery  is delighted to announce a solo show of new works by Northern Irish artist, Martin Seeds. The exhibition, No Country For Young Men, also marks the beginning of a long-term curatorial project at the gallery, The Troubles Generation, which will unfold in chapters over the coming 12 months, generously supported by the Genesis Kickstart Fund.

Martin Seeds (born in Belfast) dedicates his artistic practice to an ongoing examination of Northern Irish identity, politics and place.  He employs differing modes of experimentation with photographic process as a means of encouraging us to reconsider the image and look again.  No Country For Young Men looks back, via appropriation, at a series of found portraits in a Belfast school yearbook from 1965.  This was a time, a few years before the civil conflict known as “The Troubles” started, when political tensions in Northern Ireland were rising and trouble was brewing.  Seeds’ act of appropriation places these 1960s school portraits into our current moment, and from our historical vantage point asks us to consider how individual lives in Northern Ireland were affected by the backdrop of a violent conflict that would last for 30 years.

“What will become of these boys, their youth and their fragile aspirations, as the shadow of history falls across their lives? It is not just the past that is hauntingly present in these humble portraits, but the looming, uncertain, tumultuous future”    Sean O’Hagan (Photography critic and writer on photography for The Guardian, Observer)