12 March 2021 – 5 March 2023
After almost a year of being in and out of national and regional lockdowns, FORMAT21: Control International Photography Festival launched as an online festival and in limited venues across the City of Derby. Control is a fitting title for this iteration of the renowned Format Festival which takes place during the restrictions of the Covid 19 pandemic (2020-21). Presented online by New Art City as virtual exhibition spaces, there are over 50 photographic projects that broadly respond to the topic of Control, which includes work that responds to political, personal, cultural and racial themes. To name a few, artists that comment on surveillance include Dávid Biró’s Do you Accept Cookies? (Room 7), which raises poignant questions about unmonitored surveillance structures such as facial recognition software, and Cheryl Mukherji’s Ghorer Bairer Aalo (Room 16) in which Mukherji uses surveillance systems to monitor her mother 8500 miles is away, back ‘home’ in India. There are highly political works from MacDonaldStrand (also Room 7) that re-present existing photographs of far-right demonstrations that have recently taken place in both the UK and USA, with the provocative insignia slogans deliberately removed from the photographs. In addition, George Selley’s Human Exploitation (Room 8) deconstructs and represents a declassified military training manual in order to reflect the legacies of US military operations.
There was a democratically priced online conference at the beginning of the festival that framed the critical context for an engaged audience. In this conference, we were able to hear from a range of international artists, curators and critical thinkers during the one-day conference. This included a diverse series of talks from the festival stakeholders, as well as artistic and critical dialogues that also responded to the theme of Control. There was a particularly interesting artist’s talk by Turkish artist Cemre Yesil Gönenli who discussed her book Hayal & Hakikat, which re-activates archival photographs found in the famous Abdul Hamid II albums, that were originally made against a background of power, control and censorship, and in doing so reveals hidden histories.
There was also an extremely topical talk, from Brigitte Lardinois, the Director of the Archive Research Centre at University of Arts London and Dr Annebella Pollen, a Reader in Art History and Design, and the director for the Centre of Design history at University of Brighton, which emphasised the importance of the affective narrative that accompanies photographs such as those collected in the #massisolation PARC:Format collaborative ‘living archive’ photographic project created in response to Covid 19. Furthermore, there have been a number of additional artists’ talks and participation events that have taken place online at different points during the festival and continue to stretch beyond the initial festival month.
Overall this is an exciting festival that provides an extensive amount of online visual content with which to engage. Although the online exhibitions were at times challenging to navigate, deprived of the opportunity of interacting with the work in ‘real life’, these critical online exchanges are key to actively participating with the content of this festival and are a crucial way with which to keep up to date with current debates on photography.
Reviewed for Photomonitor by Caroline Molloy
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For further viewing:
In addition to the 3D virtual presentation of FORMAT21 International Photography Festival continuing into Spring 2023, selected exhibitions will be shown across Derby in the city’s cultural institutions and retail spaces from 17th May to 5th September 2021.
Full details on the FORMAT website.
