Exhibition
Phantasm
1 May 2025 – 25 May 2025
Regular hours
- Thursday
- 17:00 – 23:00
- Friday
- 17:00 – 23:00
- Saturday
- 17:00 – 23:00
Free admission
Address
- The Black Box
- 18-22 Hill Street
- Belfast
Northern Ireland - BT1 2LA
- United Kingdom
Phantasm manifests itself as a photographic series of the artist’s hunt for ghosts in her haunted home.
About
Phantasm is primarily concerned with the artist’s grief after losing her mother. It delves into the tangible feeling of the home you once shared with someone you loved and lost being simultaneously alive with their memory and hollow from their absence. Without her mother there, Samar’s house seems to be grieving itself in its discrete deterioration. It is haunted in a way that is comfortable, that reminds her of her mother’s presence.
Using expired film, the camera closes in on the physical manifestations of her haunting. Informed by research into the gothic, it contrasts the decay of her house with her internal decay as she grieves. The photographs hone in on light, colour, and reflection to capture a spiritual presence within the domain, whether it be transcendental or alive within the history and memory of the house.
Samar Nezamabad (b.1999) is an artist and curator based in Belfast & Limerick examining the nature of time, memory, and grief through experimental analogue photography and installation work.
She is a Co-Director and Chairperson at Catalyst Arts and a graduate of Fine Art Painting at Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD), serving as Chairperson of the LSAD Exhibition Society for the academic year of 2022-23. In 2023, she completed an internship with TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and worked as an Engagement Assistant with EVA International. She received the Collector General Purchase Award in 2023 for her work in the LSAD Graduate Show and was a member of the 2024 Douglas Hyde Gallery Student Forum. She is supported by the Freelands Foundation Artist Bursary from a-n The Artists Information Company.
Curatorial experience includes From Dust (2025) in Platform Arts, Belfast; Work in Progress (2023) in Limerick School of Art & Design; and ADVANCE (2022) in spacecraft studios, Limerick. Her visual arts practice has been exhibited in Daisy, Daisy (2024) in The Complex, Dublin; ORIGINS (2023) in Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford; Remembering the Future (2023) in VISUAL, Carlow; and The Limerick Show (2022) in Ormston House, Limerick.
