FORMAT Festival’s 20th Anniversary

The highly anticipated FORMAT festival is back for its 2024 off-year programme, and QUAD is asking you to help celebrate the 20th anniversary by attending the launch event on 15th March.

Along with the launch event on 15th March, QUAD will host a FORMAT 20th Birthday Party event on 16th March. The party will feature local organisations including Lens Fayre, W W Winters and Derbyshire Zine Library will be hosting market stalls alongside a host of exciting UK-based emerging photographers who will be selling their prints, zines and publications.

FORMAT24 will present a range of exhibitions, events and interactive activities highlighting the very best of contemporary photography and moving image works. Not to mention an exciting heritage project focussing on the Punk scene in the city of Derby in the 1970s! FORMAT is organised and is a partnership between QUAD and the University of Derby.

Celebrations on the evening of the launch will include speeches from invited guests, the curators and artists involved in the off-year programme, exclusive access to the exhibi- tions before they open to the public and complementary drinks. From 8pm to midnight there will also be DJ sets in the QUAD café from fantastic local talent Flowers Collective!

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The exhibition Future Tense – Living the Future Now in QUAD Gallery One is curated by the internationally renowned writer and curator Peggy Sue Amison and features 10 artists from around the world, including two from Irelands whose participation has been funded by a generous grant from Culture Ireland.

Future Tense is an open ended conversational, visual environment, composed of still and moving imagery viewed through a multifaceted lens of different life experiences. It also features artists from diverse cultures & backgrounds. Future Tense engages audiences in a space of frequencies that collectively communicate different channels of contemplation, considering new understandings of time, but also how image surface can be interpreted as communal space to be questioned and dissected.

Working with still photography, cinematography, documentary, mise-en-scene, & collage; artists consider topics including how mining the past can create a more dynamic future, and the ways gender identity provides a space of improvisation which can generate new understandings.

In QUAD Gallery Two is the archive/ heritage exhibition Jubilee City: Derby Punk in the 1970s, curated by artist and Derby native Aaron Williamson. The show draws on his own archive from the Derby Punk scene and is generously funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with thanks to National Lottery Players.

Jubilee City: Derby Punk in the 1970s will also include ephemera and documents arising from a call-out to individuals who were active on Derby’s punk scene between 1976 – 1979. The focus is not specifically on the music that punk threw up, but rather the expe- rience and productions of the punk milieu and audience. Focus does lie, however, in and around Derby; the borough that was granted the status of a city during the Queen’s Sil- ver Jubilee in 1977 (a national celebration that was the target of much punk derision).

Fanzines, photos, badges, tickets, posters, clothes, or any other ephem- era that have survived will be collected and exhibited in archival display cases. Similarly, selected additional printed materials (such as posters

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and photos) will be reproduced and fly-posted to the gallery walls, fittingly with wallpa-

per paste, as with 1970s flyposting.

Across QUAD’s Extra Gallery spaces will be the Future Now open call exhibition, in partnerships with LCB Depot, Leicester. Over 300 artists from around the world applied for this fantastic opportunity which is about to materialise at QUAD. The main focus around this exhibition examines

Peter Bonnell, QUAD Arts Programme Manager/ FORMAT Festival Director says: “FORMAT24 brings together a number of new exciting exhibitions produced by QUAD/ FORMAT that showcase the best of local and international talent. We are also proud to celebrate the 20th anniversary since the founding of FORMAT and look forward to 20 more years and beyond bringing the very best of photography and lens-based works by artists and curators from Derby, the UK and around the globe.”

FORMAT24 will be available to view at Derby QUAD from Saturday 16th March in the gallery and extra gallery spaces which are open each day between 12pm and 6pm. Entry to the exhibitions are free but donation points are peppered around the venue should you wish to support us. For more information on FORMAT, visit the QUAD website.