Wenn du Gehen Musst Willst du Doch Auch Bleiben|Dreamatorium
100 Hectares of Understanding|Parliament of Owls|On-going project
Family (1994) & In This Place (2016/7)|Impact, in Search of (R)evolution
Confiteor (I Confess)|The Thousand Year Old Boy|Memories of the Future
Instar|Out-of-the-way|All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Behind The Wall | Mobile Churches|Big Brother|Finisterrae
Almost Transparent Island|The Ball|Themmuns
FORMAT19
University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby DE22 1GB
Nina Röder (DE)
Wenn du Gehen Musst Willst du Doch Auch Bleiben
Under the German occupation, in the 1930s, Czech resistance was brutally suppressed. Nina’s grandparents were caught up in this movement of people and they lost everything they had, making it almost impossible for them to throw anything away in the future. After her grandparents passed away, Nina focused on the endless decisions whether to keep historical or emotionally-charged objects, by performing for the camera, Nina and her family found a way to deal with their loss.
www.ninaroeder.de
Paulina Otylie Surys (PL/UK)
Dreamatorium
A series of vernacular photographs from Poland’s Communist period, collaged with commercial Western supermarket catalogue imagery of meat, to add a sublime, uncanny element suggestive of an elusive nightmare. Meat has a symbolic history in Polish culture, it indicates to the fear of hunger during meat shortages during the war, when the country was dominated by the terror of empty shops and rationed food.
www.paulinasurys.com
Jaakko Kahilaniemi (FI)
100 Hectares of Understanding
71.6 % of the Finland is covered by forests – that’s over 26 million hectares. 100 Hectares of Understanding is Kahilaniemi’s attempt to understand the 100 hectares of forest that he inherited 1997. The artist combines his photographs with each other in order to deconstruct the results of his private rituals in the forest, uncovering objects and performative acts, which he unveils through his work.
www.jaakkokahilaniemi.com
Jack Latham, UK
Parliament of Owls
Parliament of Owls is an investigation into Bohemian Grove. An area of Redwood trees in Northern California which every summer, since 1878, has played host to the upper echelon of American society. This exclusive club starts its proceedings by carrying out the 'Cremation of Care', in which an effigy of a person is offered as sacrifice under a 40ft concrete Owl. Nixon, Reagan, Clinton are but a few of the men that call themselves members of the Grove.
www.jacklatham.com
Jonny Briggs (UK)
On-going project
In search of lost parts of Jonny Briggs’ childhood, he tries to think outside the reality he was socialised into and to create a new relationship with both his sense of family and self. Although easily assumed to be faked, upon closer inspection his images are often realised to be more real than first expected. Involving staged installations, the cartoonish and the performative, Briggs looks back to his younger self and attempts to re-capture his childhood.
www.jonnybriggs.com
Margaret Mitchell (UK)
Family (1994) & In This Place (2016/7)
Margaret Mitchell’s projects that span 22 years. ‘Family' is developed from beliefs on the stigmatisation of certain strands of society. The photographs feature the daily lives of her late sister and her three children as they navigated their lives in difficult emotional and socio-economic circumstances in their hometown in Scotland. 'In This Place' (2016-7) updates the children’s lives into adulthood, now with their own families.
www.margaretmitchell.co.uk
Zoé Aubry (CH)
Impact, in Search of (R)evolution
In 1815 during the Treaty of Vienna the Jurassians sided with the Bern revolt to defend their independence, their French language, cultural and religious rights. After many years of struggle, Jura became a Federated State. Based on the movement’s archives, the work suggests correlations between physiognomies, expressions and body positions in relationship to their ideology in which memory is constituted by emotional persistence and the fragments of a tumultuous past.
www.z-aubry.com
Tomaso Clavarino (IT)
Confiteor (I Confess)
Since 2004, more than 3,500 cases of child abuse committed by priests and Church members were reported to the Vatican. Victims are entrenched into an agonizing silence; they do not want to disclose the violence they have suffered. The scars are deep, the memories heavy, the silence deafening. Confiteor (I Confess) is a journey into these memories, into these scars, into this silence.
www.tomasoclavarino.com
Yvette Monahan (IE)
The Thousand Year Old Boy
In 2006, cavers discovered the 3,000-year-old skeleton of a child in The Burren, South West Ireland. The DNA was tested by archaeologists and matched with that of the local school children, and curiously one boy was an exact match. This made Monahan question how a landscape and its people hold the stories of those that pass through it. Using Tim Robinson’s idea of the ‘adequate step’, Monahan explores the geology, biology, myths, history, and politics of The Burren.
www.yvettemonahan.com
Benedikt Partenheimer (DE)
Memories of the Future
Memories of the Future deals with aspects of anthropogenic climate change and the resulting changes in the Alaskan landscape. Partenheimer documents the visible and almost invisible effects of permafrost thaw. “Drunken trees” and methane gas seeps are one of the main topics he has focused on. Due to climate change the melting of permafrost is accelerated and methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere.
www.benedikt-partenheimer.com
Lydia Goldblatt (UK)
Instar
Instar is a scientific term that describes biological states of change, a metamorphosis between shedding and growing. Referencing primal, revelatory changes of love and loss, Goldblatt’s work explores these experiences as speaking to the enduring nature of being human. Carbon, the basic building block of all life, appears in various forms, connecting the natural and the man-made.
www.lydiagoldblatt.com
Elena Anosova (RU)
Out-of-the-way
The project was created on the far away territories of the Extreme North of Russia. These lands are immersed into the flow of their own life in which the past and the present interlace in isolated micro communities. Electricity, supplied by a diesel generator, is available only in the mornings and evenings. Temperatures in winter average -45° Celsius. Within the last two and a half years (2015-2018) Anosova documented this impact of weather on her family life.
www.anosova.com
Leah Gordon (UK)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Air traffic control towers embody the title of the Richard Brautigan poem and subsequent Adam Curtis film, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. They exemplify benevolent surveillance and benign panopticism, as the Modern exerts itself through all-seeing architecture. They have become an enduring graceful symbol of a form of progress which protects and enables, resistant to critique, forever and now.
www.leahgordon.co.uk
Mu Ge (CN)
Behind The Wall
The series records Mu Ge’s many journeys across China. He drove 80,000 miles around lands and fields, exploring the villages and cities that felt like to two mutually interactive interconnected worlds overlooked by the Great Wall of China.
www.mugephoto.com
Anton Roland Laub (RO)
Mobile Churches
In Bucharest in the 1980s. Ceaușescu’s “systematisation” programme was in full swing in the Romanian capital: one-third of the historic centre was wiped out to make way for imposing buildings and wide avenues intended to honour the regime. Seven churches were spared and underwent a process where they are lifted and placed on rails then moved and hidden behind housing blocks. Withdrawn from Bucharest’s urban landscape, today they live secret lives holding unresolved remnants of the past.
www.antonlaub.de
Louis Quail (UK)
Big Brother
One in four of us will suffer from a mental illness in our lifetime (or a related condition in any one year). Those suffering have to face a wall of stigma and stereotyping which very often makes their condition worse. Big Brother’ is an intimate photographic portrayal of Justin, Louis Quail’s big brother, and his daily struggle with schizophrenia. Quail’s varied use of documentation shows a life in light and shade, revealing the person beyond the illness; challenging stigma head on.
www.louisquail.com
Michele Palazzi (IT)
Finisterrae
In the Ancient period Finisterrae was believed to be the end of the known world - this is how Michele Palazzi interprets the state of Southern Portugal or, formerly known as ‘Lusitania’, due to its abandonment from the EU. There is still an omnipresent esoteric ‘fume’ that surrounds this region, as reflected in the minds of its inhabitants; in the myths and beliefs that are being passed from one generation to the next.
www.michelepalazziphotographer.com
Maki Hayashida (JP)
Almost Transparent Island
Teshima, now known as one of Japan’s touristic “Island of Arts” is a rural island on the Seto Inland Sea of Japan, that between 1975-1980s had a huge volume of industrial waste illegally dumped. After a long legal battle, the dispute was settled, and the island was cleaned. Between 2000-2017, 918,000 tons of industrial waste was removed. Hayashida’s work includes documentation of the cleaning process and archival photographs from the island residents, taken between 1980-2000s.
www.makihayashida.com
Ingvar Kenne (AU)
The Ball
The Bachelor and Spinsters Balls take place across rural Australia, events originally designed to overcome distance; formalised social congregations providing opportunity for locals to meet life partners. It has over time dissolved into chaos, anarchy and an urge to disconnect from the established. This chaos becomes both representation and metaphor for living with an intensity that suggests that life is forever and neither yesterday or tomorrow matter.
www.ingvarkenne.com
Jens Schwarz (DE)
Themmuns
Is a documentary photo project on youth in Northern Ireland where the slang term “themmuns”, derived from ‘them ones’, is used by both Catholic Irish nationalists and Protestant unionists to refer to those on the other side of the religious-political divide. Under the anticipated terms of a Brexit agreement still in negotiation, Northern Ireland will leave the European Union along with the rest of the UK, despite a majority Remain vote. Most unionists support the decision to leave whilst most nationalists do not, and there is real concern that a hard border between the EU and the UK will threaten the Peace Process and rekindle old conflicts.
www.themmuns.net
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