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Memorial Gestures 1: December 2022 – May 2023

In our inaugural year of Memorial Gestures we worked with artists Jordan Baseman, Laura Fisher and April Lin 林森 from December 2022 – May 2023. Find a collection of blog posts, exhibition texts and documentation of work below.

  • Memorial Gestures 1

    Jordan Baseman
    April Lin 林森
    Laura Fisher
    Jordan Baseman, April Lin 林森 & Laura Fisher respond to the archive of Holocaust Centre North with work spanning video, textiles, sound, sculpture, and print. Respectively, their work dissects retellings of traumatic histories and places, speculatively explores the potential of survivors’ images and archive material, and elevates messages and gestures of hope and affection.

    The notion of ‘after-images’ offers a framework for contemplating the outcomes of this inaugural year of Holocaust Centre North’s Memorial Gestures residency program. Developed by art historian James E. Young ‘after-images’ describe the delayed encounters with memory that arise in a context of generational distance, drawing from psychoanalysis and trauma theory. Young believes that artistic mediation can shape the future practice of history – particularly when answers are impossible to find and traditional methodologies come face to face with a material destruction of records that is often intrinsic to Holocaust history. With this in mind Memorial Gestures aims to explore the intersections of history, memory, and art, asking where they lead us and what knowledge and possible healing they can generate.

    April 林森, Jordan and Laura rely on colours, textures, materials, light, movements, and sound to amplify aspects that language cannot. It might be said that Memorial Gestures enacts and explores the possibilities and limits of language. Nowhere are the incapacities of language more acute than in the aftermath of trauma – or as one of our participants, a member of the second generation recently said:

    ‘artistic methodologies helped me confront the loss when answers become unavailable, the intergenerational trauma and the impact on present times.’

    In creating their work, the artists have insisted upon the gap between experience and its enunciation, between history and its representation, between the self and the other. Through this residency programme, contemporary artists are producing memorial gestures, episodes that allow for the possibility of remembering, the possibility of discourse, of communication, and with that, the transmission of the experience of the other – in essence, the transmission of history.

    Artist Biographies

    Jordan Baseman is a visual artist and filmmaker. He received a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith’s College, University of London. Baseman is currently the Reader in Time-Based Media, Senior Tutor in Moving Image at the Royal College of Art, London.

    Baseman has a long history of creating projects in collaboration with UK-based and international, not-for-profit and public institutions. The artworks are installations, audio works, and single-screen films. Jordan Baseman’s films are frequently featured in international exhibitions and film festivals including: Los Angeles Animation Festival (Best Experimental Short Film), San Francisco Short Film Festival, Melbourne Underground Film Festival (Best International Short Film), Oaxaca International Film Festival, Lone Star International Film Festival (where he won Best Short Film), Fargo International Film Festival (Best Experimental Film) Kansas City International Film Festival (Best Experimental Short Film), 53rd Venice Biennale, and London Short Film Festival.

    Selected Recent Exhibitions and Projects: Artist in Residence, Chelsea + Westminster Hospital Intensive Care Unit, London (2021/2022); A Different Kind of Different, Matt’s Gallery, London, (2021); I Dreamt I saw you at Lidl, Without Reduction, Happy Hypocrite, Book Works, London (2021); A River in Reverse, UNTV, Unconformity, Queenstown Tasmania, Australia (2020); Fabula, BBC and Culture in Quarantine, London, (2020); Radio Influenza, Wellcome Trust, London, (2019); gendersick, Fort Worth Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, Texas, (2018); Blackout 7 Films by Jordan Baseman, Broadway Metro, Eugene, Oregon (2018); The Unconformity, Artist in Residence, Queenstown, Tasmania (2018); 1977, House of St. Barnabas, London (2017); DisObey, Matt’s Gallery @ Close-Up Cinema, London (2017).

    Laura Fisher (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary artist who incorporates drawing, printmaking, and textiles to create a dialogue between past and present, weaving together the threads of lesser told stories in order to reposition history toward a more personal, human-centred context. Reflecting on concepts such as displacement, identity, memory, and questioning the notion of ‘home’, her work simultaneously serves as a visual conversation, a call to community, and a tribute to the grief inherent in traumatic histories. Throughout the Memorial Gestures residency, Laura has explored the archive at HCN and engaged with survivors and their families, primarily researching the role of textiles in Holocaust refugees’ lives through handicraft, hobby, and labor. The resulting body of visual work, created in response to these histories, challenges how we perceive the residual trauma of the Holocaust and questions how it has informed both cultural and social memory.

    April Lin 林森 (b. 1996, Stockholm — they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator investigating image-making and world-building as sites for the construction, sustenance, and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths. Working across moving image, performance, creative computing and installation, they dream & explore & critique & fret & catastrophise & imagine & play — for a collective remembering of forgotten pasts, for a critical examination of normalised presents, and for a visualising of freer futures as, of course, imagined from the periphery.

    Interweaving strands of auto-biography, documentary, queer ecology, and new media, April Lin 林森’s works are topped off with an inevitable garnish consisting of the other matters dialoguing with their brain and heart during the making process of each piece. Uniting their genre-fluid body of work is a commitment to centring oppressed knowledges, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care, and exploring the linkages between history, memory, and interpersonal and structural trauma.

    Their work has been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image New York, Sheffield DocFest, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, the V&A Museum.

    Image Gallery
    Laura Fisher Ich bin hier (2023) & Hast du nicht Schnackerl? installed at Dai 大 hall, May 2023. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Kubie family; the family of Iby Knill – Chris Knill & Pauline Kinch; and Laura Fisher. Read more here

    April Lin 林森 The Gaps Between the Unforgettable (2023) installed at Holocaust Centre North, June 2023. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Black, Kubie, and Simon families; and April Lin 林森.

    Jordan Baseman These Were Not Simple Deaths (2023) installed at Holocaust Centre North, June 2023. Courtesy of Matt’s Gallery, London and Jordan Baseman. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of Lilian Black & Frank Griffiths (audio testimony).

    Jordan Baseman These Were Not Simple Deaths (2023) installed at Holocaust Centre North, June 2023. Courtesy of Matt’s Gallery, London and Jordan Baseman. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of Lilian Black & Frank Griffiths (audio testimony).

    April Lin 林森 The Gaps Between the Unforgettable (2023) installed at Holocaust Centre North, June 2023. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Black, Kubie, and Simon families; and April Lin 林森.

    Laura Fisher Space Between (2023) installed at Dai 大 hall, May 2023. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Kubie family; the family of Iby Knill – Chris Knill & Pauline Kinch; and Laura Fisher.

    Laura Fisher Ich bin hier (2023) installed at Dai 大 hall, May 2023. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the family of Iby Knill – Chris Knill & Pauline Kinch; and Laura Fisher.

    Laura Fisher Tausend Küsse (2023). Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Erner family; and Laura Fisher.

    Laura Fisher 23.4.34 & To wish you a prosperous life (2023) installed at Dai 大 hall, May 2023. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Kubie family; and Laura Fisher. Read more here.

  • Red Cross Blankets (2023)

    Laura Fisher

    knitted blankets (100% combed cotton yarn), varying sizes 80x136cm – 150x250cm

    These knitted blankets are based on telegrams and letters from the archive at Holocaust Centre North. Conveying sentiments of warmth, hope, and solidarity, and facilitated by organisations such as the Red Cross, these messages were often the only means of communication allowed between people imprisoned in concentration camps and their loved ones in the outside world.

    Laura Fisher ‘Ich bin hier’ (2023) & ‘Hast du nicht Schnackerl?’ installed at Dai 大 hall, May 2023. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Kubie family; the family of Iby Knill – Chris Knill & Pauline Kinch; and Laura Fisher.

    Laura Fisher 23.4.34 & To wish you a prosperous life installed at Dai 大 hall, May 2023. Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Kubie family; and Laura Fisher.

    Laura Fisher MILLIONEN KÜSSE AUCH EUER BRUDER. Mama. (2023) Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of Michelle Green; and Laura Fisher.

    Laura Fisher heaps of love kisses yours henry mendel (2023). Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of Rachel Mendel; and Laura Fisher.

  • Blog – Jordan Baseman

    Details are Important

    We seem to be at a time in our history where there are many open divisions in our society, exemplified by vaccine/anti-vaccine, Brexit Leave/Remain, Trump, January 6th at the Capitol, etc. Facts are distorted, known truths are maligned and manipulated, fuelled by anger and hatred. Authentic voices are lost, information is denigrated which creates fear and opportunities for openly promoting discord. This is familiar…

    Image Credit: Jordan Baseman

    Culturally I think that it is imperative that we actively do not forget what happened during Nazi Germany, that we continue to study the social, economic and political conditions which enable forms of genocide to occur, that we continue to broadcast truths about the Holocaust in many different forms, forever.

    As we move away from those moments in history, as decades accrue, these events are being denied in the first instance with damaging contemporary narratives forming and shaping counter-narratives, in attempts to undermine historical events – to erase anew. Details are lost, information evaporates. I believe that personal testimony, witness accounts continue to hold the keys to dismantling hatred, preventing future harms. Preventing future harms through research and the production of artworks is a primary reason as to why I am interested in this project.

    More generally, I think it is important to try to counter hatred, with compassion and emotional intelligence. I believe that we can’t be afraid to study hate, to understand the ramifications of teaching and instilling hatred to be able to prevent future genocidal opportunities.

    Art is a useful way to challeng ideas: facilitating emotional encounters for audiences, opening new ways to discuss and question, new ways to understand and reflect.

    For me, contemporary art is uniquely able to address false, dangerous notions, to instigate conversations that make active contributions to the prevention of genocides, to the reduction of fear and harm and to preventing the spread of hate. For me, art does change the world: incrementally, slowly. And maybe one person at a time. I know that art changes us and has the capacity to soothe and to upset – often within the same artwork.