BELFAST.- Belfast Exposed is presenting Beyond Maps and Atlases by internationally renowned Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen. This is the artist’s first body of work produced in Ireland and traces her journey across the island over the past year and a half. During her visits she stayed in the homes of strangers, mostly other photographers living across Ireland, who became friends with van Manen and made work alongside the artist. While travelling she became immersed in Irish literature and was guided by the words and landscapes of Seamus Heaney, John Banville and John McGahern as much as the people she travelled with.

Bertien van Manen is known for her poetic and intuitive style of photography, capturing intimate and spontaneous moments on a simple snapshot camera. Relying on chance encounters and accidental discoveries van Manen portrays an Irish landscape that is at times otherworldly in its beauty and raw in its savagery. She penetrates the private worlds of her subjects and renders contemporary Ireland as a place shrouded in mist and ghosts.

“At first, working in Ireland I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. My husband had died. I dispensed with the people and reflected on the atmosphere. I was guided by a feeling and a search, a longing for some kind of meaning in a place of myths and legends.” ---Bertien van Manen, September 2015.

Bertien van Manen (b.1942) lives and works in Amsterdam. She has exhibited widely with solo and group exhibitions at major galleries including Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), FOAM (Amsterdam), Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Photographers Gallery (London) and Fotomuseum Winterthur. Her work is part of major international collections including Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris) and The Metropolitan Museum of Photographie (Tokyo). Publications include A Hundred Summers, A Hundred Winters (1994), East Wind, West Wind (2001), In Moldova (2005), Give Me Your Image (2006), Let’s sit down before we go (2011), Easter and Oak Trees (2013), Moonshine (2014).

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of the same name that has been published by MACK books in January 2016. The book is available to buy from the Belfast Exposed Bookshop.