The
Artist
Eslam Abd El Salam
Lives and Works in
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Eslam Abd El Salam is a visual artist based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His work focuses on walking as a pedagogical practice and is centered around the body: the body in motion, in contact with nature, and in the presence of other bodies.
Through the mediums of analogue photography, Polaroids, text, moving image, and mixed media, Eslam considers notions of synchronicity, specifically in relation to friendship and serendipitous encounters with others. Other recurring themes in his work include family archives, time, and displacement. He is keen to visually find the common thread between the personal and collective within his artistic practice.
Originally from Cairo, Egypt, and based in Belfast since 2022, Eslam's journey to Ireland began in March 2019 as an artist-in-residence at The Curfew Tower in Cushendall. His work has been exhibited internationally in Finland, France, Latvia, Egypt, and the UK. Most recently, he has worked with Kunstverein Aughrim on developing a long-term photographic and installation project called Can You See with Your Heart? that was exhibited during Craic in the Granite Music & Arts Festival on the 27th of June 2025.
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Eslam Abd El Salam
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Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.
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Visvaldas Morkevicius (b. 1990) is a Lithuanian artist s a Lithuanian artist working in the expanded field of the image, who explores photography and its boundaries through personal experiences and reflections on society. His work navigates themes of identity, technology, and power, blending minimalism with layered narratives to examine modern life’s emotional and psychological dimensions.
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Salvatore Vitale (b. 1986, Palermo, Italy) is a Swiss-based artist, director, and professor whose work explores the complexity of contemporary societies. Using expanded and speculative storytelling through mixed media techniques, he focuses on the politics of systems that regulate modernity and the impact of technological transformations.
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Ángel Luis González Fernández is a designer, artist, and curator supporting engaging visual arts practices, winner of Business to Arts David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards 2011.
His work manifests through PhotoIreland, which he founded in 2010 to stimulate a critical dialogue on Photography. He devises curatorial projects placing conversations in the public realm around visual culture, critical thinking. These include events (PhotoIreland Festival, Halftone Print Fair, arts residency How to Flatten a Mountain, and New Irish Works), a cultural hub (The Library Project: Ireland’s Art bookshop, host to a unique resource library of photobooks and a productive arts programme), publishing projects that distribute inexpensive access to local practices, research projects (Critical Academy: examining contemporary art practices). He works collaboratively with a growing network of organisations, noticeably through ambitious Creative Europe partnerships.
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Iveta Gabaliņa (1979) is a curator, artist and educator. She has studied photography at the studio of Andrejs Grants, at Bournemouth Art Institute, and in the MA programme at Alto University in Helsinki. Her work has been exhibited in Latvia and internationally, including at C/O (Berlin, Germany), GESTE (Paris), and Williams Tower Gallery (Houston, USA). Gabaliņa has participated in photography festivals in Singapore, Hanover, and elsewhere. Her work is included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Geste Paris, and the Deutsche Börse Art Collection.
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I’ve always loved photography, even if it sounds like a cliche. The first photos I took, I did without knowing how to do that, without paying any attention to framing, subject or composition. After a while, I began to understand what is happening in the space between me as a photographer and the subject I was photographing. And many years later, I also understood why I love to photograph. To communicate. A message, a concept, an emotion.
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