Gareth McConnell’s largest institutional presentation to date opens at Stills in Edinburgh this November, bringing together three decades of work shaped by the competing forces of conflict, rave culture, memory and political history. An Illusion spans work made from 1995 to the present and will be the most extensive presentation of McConnell’s photography at a UK institution so far.
McConnell grew up in Northern Ireland / The North of Ireland at the height of the conflict and came of age as part of the rave generation in the 1990s. Those two formative experiences sit in tension throughout the exhibition: the visual language of sectarian division on one side and the temporary freedom of the dancefloor on the other. That contrast has continued to shape his work, particularly through saturated colour, light and movement.
The exhibition opens with the first comprehensive gallery presentation of Details of Sectarian Murals, a series made in Northern Ireland between 1997 and 1999, during the period of peace talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement. McConnell isolated details from murals carrying flags, colours, symbols, weapons and declarations of allegiance, pushing them into extreme close-up until their original political messages begin to collapse into abstraction. Colour, texture and gesture take over from ideology, turning a language designed to declare allegiance into something far less stable.
That strategy of isolating, reframing and disrupting fixed meanings recurs throughout McConnell’s practice. In The Stop, he returns to photographs made in London during the mass demonstration against the impending invasion of Iraq in February 2003, combining redacted archival images of young protesters with more recent flower still lifes. Flowers appear frequently in McConnell’s work as memento mori, and here they become a way of thinking about both the transience of youth and the fragility of historical moments captured by the camera.
A new moving-image and sound work will also premiere at Stills, reconfiguring text and images from McConnell’s 30-year archive with a specially commissioned soundtrack by Smagghe & Cross. The collaboration adds another layer to the exhibition’s relationship with nightlife and sound, connecting McConnell’s photographic archive back to the subcultural spaces that helped shape his visual language.
Rather than offering a straightforward account of recent history, An Illusion focuses on its ruptures and after-effects. The exhibition asks what happens when images are removed from their original contexts and made to carry different meanings, suggesting that looking itself can become a political act. By isolating, cropping and recontextualising images, McConnell creates space for apparently fixed histories to become unstable again.
Curated by Stills Director Vivienne Gamble, the exhibition has been conceived as a response to Paul Graham’s Troubled Land, shown at Stills in 1987, as the Edinburgh photography centre prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2027. The connection places McConnell’s work within a longer history of photographers attempting to make sense of conflict, landscape and political identity through the camera.
McConnell, born in 1972 in Northern Ireland / The North of Ireland, is an artist, photographer and founder and editor-in-chief of Sorika, the collaborative art and publishing project he established in 2013. Recent exhibitions include To The Beat Of The Drum at Ulster Museum, Belfast, and The Brighter the Flowers, The Fiercer the Town at Seen Fifteen, London.
Gareth McConnell: An Illusion
20th November 2026–27th February 2027
Stills Centre for Photography, Edinburgh
Preview: 19th November, 6PM–8PM
