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“Quiet Hours: Nighttime and Grief” exhibition: Photography in Context
Get to know the artists behind the Der Greif “Quiet Hours” online exhibition confronting loss, memory, and healing after dark
Der Greif presents the launch of the online exhibition, “Quiet Hours: Nighttime and Grief”, timed in honor of National Grief Awareness Day. When the sun sets and daily noise fades, quiet hours amplify our deepest reflections. This curated collection brings together twelve artists who use the canvas of nighttime, lit by artificial streetlights, soft twilight, or absolute dark, to process loss, transition, and emotional survival.
Grief manifests in infinite ways: the death of a parent, political displacement, bodily trauma, or the quiet fading of childhood shelters. Across these diverse lens-based projects, darkness shifts from a realm of fear into a space of sanctuary, historical reckoning, and quiet transformation, showing that processing loss after hours is a deeply human act of endurance.
The exhibition opens with Jose Martín’s "Noche, no te vayas” (“Night, do not leave”) where the artist draws upon his roots in Mexico City to craft a confessional visual dialogue. Using photography and writing, Martín treats the night as a vessel to observe, remember, and navigate complex identity, clinging to the nocturnal space before daylight demands emotional resolution.
Turning from internal reflection to public urgency, Donal Husni’s "The Night Riots" captures high-tension nocturnal clashes in Jakarta following the tragic death of an online driver. Security tear gas and reactive fireworks illuminate the dark, transforming urban streets into a site of collective grief and fierce, late-night demands for justice.
In "MELANCHOLY," Kirill Muniabin examines the quiet aftermath of his mother’s sudden passing and its impact on his solitary father. Muniabin utilizes the atmosphere of late evening to challenge traditional tropes of stoic masculinity, rendering visible the physical weight of isolation, attachment, and enduring memory when returning to an empty home.
Federico Masini’s "Mezzaluce" treats darkness as a childhood sanctuary, blending real and fictional horror to construct an album of reimagined memories. For Masini, the dark was never a place of threat, but a safe territory away from adult scrutiny, a shared ground for those navigating anxiety and the fear of not being enough.
Sara Hinterlong addresses visual disorientation and the shifting meaning of home amidst aging family and inherited belief systems. Their work explores how sustained friction against traditional social roles alters our relationship to physical space and emotional belonging.
In "Para sa kasalanan ko” (“For my sins”), Virginia Morini investigates the collapsing boundary between girlhood and imposed womanhood in the Philippines. Documenting young girls navigating poverty, pregnancy, and sex work, Morini’s collaborative approach reveals how internalized guilt and state pressures weigh on vulnerable young bodies in the shadows.
Tanya Podubienko presents "Trip into Adulthood," a surreal exploration of personal growth in Ukraine. Blending hyper-vivid colors and symbolic childhood imagery, Podubienko uses experimental processes to capture moments of bodily awakening, vulnerability, and transition within an uncertain world.
Kelly Rosa’s "Sēcrētus" journeys into the secretive, matriarchal world of ancestral healers in Puglia, Italy. Through slow, ritualistic analogue processes, Rosa reclaims the dignity of women historically marginalized as "masciare," honoring subterranean spirituality as a sacred act of resistance.
Grant MacAllister approaches "The Quiet Hours" with a cinematic sensibility, using shadow and ambient urban light in Los Angeles to build psychological tension. His nocturnal medium-format photographs evoke an unsettling sense of emptiness, leaving space for stories to linger in ordinary spaces.
In "The Clear Image of Paradise," Judit Gyuricza-Osváth revisits her childhood garden to examine how children construct parallel universes to escape an overwhelming world. Through analogue imagery, she reflects on the fragile, constructed nature of memory and our persistent longing for safe, imagined shelters.
Natalie Stanczak’s "Kristallisierte Wahrheit" treats the night as a space where migration, political violence, and Polish-German historical trauma surface. Assembling archival documents, flash photography, and performance, Stanczak approaches the body as a living archive carrying unspoken grief.
The exhibition concludes with Arthur Mercier’s "Zones Blanches," which exposes the reality of electrohypersensitivity as individuals retreat to digital blind spots to escape electromagnetic fields. Mercier illuminates the dark, off-grid lives of the digitally exiled as they shield themselves from modern technology, using isolation as a final sanctuary for survival.
Through cinematic tension, archival interventions, ancestral rituals, and intimate self-reflection, these projects reveal how darkness can transform personal trauma into shared catharsis. The exhibition invites to step into the quiet hours and consider how loss, light, and memory guide our path toward healing.
Sara Hinterlong (b. 2002) is a photographer from Richmond, VA, living between New Haven, CT and New York, NY. They received their BFA in Photography and Art History from Maryland Institute College of Art, where they won the Jan Meyer Traveling Fellowship for "I Used to Think I Had Been Relieved of Desire." After several years working as a research specialist in a photographer's archive, they will begin their MFA candidacy in Photography at Yale School of Art this fall.
Donal Husni (b. 1975, Jakarta) is a photographer with a background in public health from the University of Indonesia. His work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Telegraph, and The Independent, among others. He has worked with clients including the Ford Foundation, Toyota Tsusho, and GIZ, and is represented by Zumapress. His awards include 1st place in the Kiehl Photo Competition and the Biofarma Indonesia Photo Competition.
Grant MacAllister is a Los Angeles–based photographer and cinematographer whose work explores the intersection of cinema and still photography. With over sixteen years of experience, his practice is drawn to nocturnal landscapes, psychological tension, and the poetry of the built environment. Influenced by his work in film and television, he approaches photography with a narrative sensibility, using light, atmosphere, and composition to create images suspended between fiction and reality. His work has been exhibited in group shows including "Grand Central Market Show" (2026), "Emptiness at Exhibizone" (2026), and "Notes from LA: New Photography" (2025). In 2025, he also attended Todd Hido’s Cinematic Storytelling workshop in Portland, Maine.
Jos Martín was born and raised in Mexico City, a place whose overlapping cultures, subcultures, and social and political realities shaped his early search for his own position within that complex landscape. Photography and writing became both tool and confessional for him — a way to observe, question, remember, and speak, and to navigate the identity, history, and contradictions felt in everyday city life.
Federico Masini (b. 1988, Moncalieri) is an Italian photographer based in Turin. With a background in Medicine and Surgery, his practice explores the visceral relationship between the human body and the natural environment, balancing precise composition with emotional intensity. His debut monograph, "They Return To Their Earth," explores nudity as a biological state beyond cultural constructs. His work was selected for the LensCulture Critics' Choice 2022 and exhibited internationally.
Arthur Mercier graduated in Film Studies from the University of Bordeaux and Paris X-Nanterre, then worked nine years as a cameraman and production manager before studying documentary photojournalism at EMI. His first series, "Icare," received the Laurent Troude Grant and has been exhibited internationally. His subsequent projects received support from La grande commande photo and CNAP. In 2025, he joined the Tendance Floue collective and contributes to Le Monde and Libération.
Virginia Morini (b. 2000, Faenza) is a multimedia artist whose research explores family, secrecy, sexuality, trauma, and religion. After studying Cinema in Bologna, she graduated from the Magnum Photos & Spéos Master in Creative Documentary & Photojournalism in Paris in 2023. Her long-term projects examine collective trauma, sexual abuse, and memory, and have been exhibited at Magnum Photos Gallery Paris, Mesnographies Festival, and 3Fest. She has assisted Magnum photographer Lorenzo Meloni.
Kirill Muniabin (b. 1978, Nizhny Novgorod) is a photographer working at the intersection of post-documentary and performative practice. After earning an engineering degree and PhD in technical sciences, he spent over 15 years outside the arts before devoting himself fully to photography in 2022. His projects draw on real biographies and memories, exploring vulnerability, loneliness, and the quiet complexity of everyday life. His work has been recognized in Critical Mass Top 50 and the LensCulture Portrait Awards.
Judit Gyuricza-Osváth (b. 1992, Debrecen) is a Hungarian photographer who received her MA in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2026. Rooted in personal experience and shaped by a documentary sensibility, her practice explores memory, identity, inner emotional processes, and everyday life. Her work has been exhibited at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, TOBE Gallery, and Photon Gallery, and will feature in the BredaPhoto International Talent Programme 2026.
Tanya Podubienko is a visual artist based in Odesa, Ukraine, working with photography and experimental processes. Her practice explores memory, solitude, vulnerability, and the unstable relationship between perception and reality, recontextualizing everyday and found materials to reveal hidden associations. Her work has been exhibited at Art Market Budapest, Photo Kyiv Fair, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Odesa. She was awarded the Gold Medal in Conceptual Photography at FotoSlovo 2025.
Kelly Rosa is a photographer raised in Puglia and now based in the Netherlands. Her work explores the quiet magic, unspoken weight, belonging, and nostalgia carried by people and places, shaped by the everyday spirituality and inherited knowledge of the women in her community. She approaches photography as a form of translation, working primarily in analogue and developing her own negatives, treating image-making as a slow, deliberate ritual that values honesty over perfection.
Natalie Stanczak is a family and portrait photographer and sociologist from Augsburg. Her images give visibility to faces erased from social discourse, evoking entire stories with quiet clarity. Moving from individual traces to collective archiving, she dedicates her art to raising awareness of structural inequality, intersectionality, solidarity, and connectedness.