Traces of A Traumatic Future

Frédéric Huska

Opening: 02/05/26- 20/06/26

Opening Event: 2/05/26 at 1pm

Lower Gallery

Golden Thread Gallery is presenting a new body of work by French artist Frédéric Huska, who is based in Northern Ireland. Working with photography, Huska explores the relationship between personal experience, time and landscape. This new exhibition features a series of black and white analogue photographs of Taiwan’s coastline, seen as places shaped by political tension and uncertainty.

The project focuses on fourteen beaches identified as possible landing sites in the event of invasion. Starting at the sea and moving inland toward the mountains, the photographs follow the shape of the land. The images hold a quiet tension, moving between distance and closeness, presence and absence.

The photographs suggest futures that may never happen, yet still influence how we see the present. Using analogue photography, Huska reflects on time, memory and how images carry traces of both past and future.

The work creates space for uncertainty. The landscapes feel both powerful and hard to define, shaped by global politics but open to different interpretations. The exhibition invites viewers to slow down and consider how we imagine what lies ahead.

The project began during an important moment in the artist’s life, marked by the death of his father and the birth of his daughter. This experience of loss and new life deepened his interest in questions about the future, vulnerability and hope.

Bio:

Frédéric Huska was awarded a three year residency at Fire Station Artists’ Studios in 2018. His work has been presented internationally, including a solo exhibition at The MAC, collaborative projects at PLACE and QSS Gallery, and a solo exhibition at Belfast Exposed. He has participated in group exhibitions including MAC International 2016, presentations at Ku Art Center, Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, and National Portrait Gallery. He currently lectures at Ulster University and has led photography and reflective writing workshops at The Metropolitan Arts Centre as part of the Curatorial Directions Programme.

Traces of a Traumatic Future continues the artist’s sustained inquiry into the unstable ground between visibility and invisibility, past and future, and the political and the intimate.

Sharon Kelly’s practice mediates between memory, experience and imagination, working across 2 and 3D processes, including drawing, painting, print, sculpture and installation. Her work is concerned with the body; with marking and mapping the physical and psychological, exploring themes of fragility, resilience, liminality and transformation. Inspirations come from diverse sources such as anatomy, medicine, dressmaking and sport.

In this new body of work, present at Golden Thread Gallery,Kelly reflects on what remains hidden or unnoticed and how such absences shape our sense of identity and connection to the world around us. Through the use of worn clothing, vintage sewing patterns, and other delicate materials, Kelly delves into the emotional complexities of concealment and burden, uncovering traces of past lives and contemplating what is missing or left unfulfilled. Pockets become quiet repositories, holding secrets, forgotten memories, or unseen places, offering a space where the precious and the heavy coexist. In this excavation of personal history, Kelly explores themes of intimacy, emotional weight, and inherited burden, particularly through the lens of female experience.

Bio:
In 2023 she was awarded the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Major Individual Award, in recognition of her contribution to the arts. Recent work has been supported by The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, USA, 2022 and in 2023 she completed a fellowship at the British School at Rome, Italy.

Set around Tropicana Café on Scotch Street, beside Dungannon bus station, this film frames a single building as a living record of the town. Through interviews, on-site observation and archival material, Richardson and Alexander map how local life has been reorganised through work, movement, demographic change, and the pressures and possibilities of living together in Ulster’s most diverse town.