18. THE SECRET OF SURVIVAL IS NOT TO BE NOTICED (2025) – Nathalie Olah

2025. Takeaway broadsides. A2 Print

This new work by writer-in-residence Nathalie Olah is presented
as a stack of takeaway broadsides—identical prints, each offering
a glimpse into her forthcoming book, to be announced later this
year. Her work offers a meditation on survival, aesthetics, and
belonging. Visitors are warmly invited to take a copy. As the stack
slowly disappears, the work traces a quiet choreography of care.

Rooted in the archive of Holocaust survivor Iby Knill, the text weaves
together historical reflection and philosophical inquiry. It draws
out the subtle but persistent connections between Iby’s handmade garments—scrapbooks of stitches, notes on fabric, acts of mending—and broader questions about who is granted the space
to be seen, remembered, and understood in their full humanity.

Olah writes from a position of inheritance. Her own background as
a descendant of a Romani man from East Hungary offers a way of
listening across the silences that characterise the archive. In this
crossing between Jewish and Romani memory, between personal
and collective loss, she does not seek resolution. Instead, she asks
how threads might be held together in the face of erasure.

In Iby’s story, aesthetics is presented as a method of survival: clothes
turned inside out, hems repaired in secret, dignity expressed in
style and gesture. Against the violence of classification—of being
ranked, measured, deformed—beauty re-emerges as something
unruly, a soft defiance and a refusal to disappear.

Olah’s book, the outcome of her Memorial Gestures residency,
will be announced later in 2025.