Greif Alumni at FORMAT Festival's 20th Anniversary

On March 15th, FORMAT Festival launched its 2024 edition, which is on view across multiple venues in Derby and the East Midlands until July 30th. The highly anticipated off-year programme is a celebration of the festival's 20th birthday, which kicked off with a special event on March 16th at QUAD, Derby's central hub for art and film. QUAD is a mixed arts venue based on the Market Place.

Since 2004, FORMAT has brought to the Derby photography scene an outstanding array of talent and is now the UK's leading international contemporary festival of photography and related media. It offers a programme of commissions, open calls, residencies, conferences, and collaborations in the UK and internationally. Der Greif presents four of our community artists exhibiting at FORMAT24: Sergey Novikov, Katrin Koenning, Rana Young & Zora J Murff.

Sergey Novikov’s "Ghostly Museum" is a series about the long and difficult history of the Norilsk Museum in Russia, specifically its various reincarnations, as well as broader issues in museology as a scientific discipline. The museum has a complex history, having originated in 1939 in a spacious basement room of a barrack on one of Norilsk's first streets. It was initially operated by the secret police and remained a closed establishment until 1948. Novikov's documentary photography, first published in 2021, speculatively portrays the museum's closure in 1965 for unknown reasons and the subsequent loss of its collections. Novikov combines archival, historical found photos with his own shots, aiming to create a limbo where reality and staged elements intertwine, challenging the accepted narrative of history. This series is part of the "Future Now" exhibition at FORMAT24, curated by Jodi Kwok.

Katrin Koenning’s work, on view as part of the "Future Tense" exhibition curated by Peggy Sue Aminson, is a documentary-style visual representation of a time in which vested interests, an obsession with economic growth, and capitalist pursuit are shaping the world. Titled "The Kids Are In Trouble," the project encourages us to imagine the present as a moment with multiple potential realities, emphasizing photography's ability to create narratives and reimagine reality through imagined visions. Koenning's work offers a non-hierarchical way of seeing, rejecting a human-centric perspective. Instead, it gives equal space to the greater living world, encompassing both humans and animals, emphasizing connection rather than separation. Through carefully constructed image-dialogues, Koenning explores extended narrative possibilities and the value of documentation. Her long-form series captures the entanglement between the human and non-human, fostering a non-hierarchical representation of the world.

The “Future Tense” exhibition at FORMAT24 also features images by Zora J Murff and Rana Young, who present their photographic series "Fade Like a Sigh", a work that has been exhibited nationally and featured widely online. Together, Murff and Young began mining their own family histories, exploring the void left by an absent parent. The images in "Fade Like a Sigh" reflect their dialogues started in 2017 on this communal experience. Using their personal small collections of family photographs and reinterpreting them through their own contemporary imagery, Murff and Young highlight the complicated relationship between the photographic record and the fragmented and abstract nature of memory.