Memorial Gestures Exhibition at Sunny Bank Mills

June 6-28th 2025

Tues-Sat 10am-4pm
Thursdays 10am-7pm
Sundays 12pm-4pm
closed Mondays

How do we continue to remember the Holocaust with depth and relevance? And to what end?

Stories of migration, trauma, loss, hope, resilience and survival are explored through artworks created by 14 artists, writers and translators in residence.

Jordan Baseman, Rey Conquer, Laura Fisher, Tom Hastings, Maud Haya-Baviera, Sierra Kaag, April Forrest Lin æž—æŁź, Hannah Machover, Laura Nathan, Nathalie Olah, Irina Razumovskaya, Chebo Roitter Pavez, Matt J Smith and Ariane Schick have responded to collections held in the Holocaust Centre North Archive with works spanning textiles, video, installation, photography, drawing, etching, ceramics, print, found objects, and text.

Their artworks delve into the complex emotional and ethical dimensions of Holocaust history and remembrance—through colour, sound, texture, composition, repetition, and gesture—in ways that words or data alone cannot. In mediating stories from the Holocaust Centre North Archive, the Memorial Gestures artists explore how to evoke the layered emotional realities found in personal accounts of mass atrocity and trauma—aware that memorialisation can sometimes displace as much memory as it preserves.

In course of their residencies at Holocaust Centre North, spanning between 6 and 9 months, each artist responded to archive material they felt held contemporary relevance. The resulting works reflect critical, intimate and animated dialogues between their own diverse life experiences and Holocaust history.

Through their works, the artists have engaged with the experiences of Jewish mill workers in Yorkshire (including at Kagan Textile Works), the intergenerational trauma of children of Holocaust survivors, marginalised Roma and LGBTQ+ stories, letters of families desperately seeking safety abroad and the final telegrams between loved ones.

By giving physical form to archive material, these works invite audiences into a dialogue with history—one that resonates powerfully amid a global rise in authoritarianism, antisemitism, ethnic and religious conflict, and mass displacement.

Memorial Gestures compels us to engage, even when it might be easier to look away. We hope that by doing so, we can build a culture of care towards stories of trauma, foster greater resilience against a contemporary politics of dehumanisation and create space for a culture of solidarity. This harkens back to the very aim motivating Holocaust survivors to come together in the mid 1990’s to form the organisation and community that would grow into Holocaust Centre North.

As well as visual art, the works of resident writers and translators also form part of the exhibition. Tom Hastings, Rey Conquer, Sierra Kaag and Nathalie Olah have been commissioned by Holocaust Centre North to share works-in-progress from their forthcoming book-length projects.

Memorial Gestures runs from Friday 6th to Saturday 28th June 2025 at The 1912 Mill, Sunny Bank Mills, Farsley, Pudsey, West Yorkshire. The exhibition opens on Thursday 5 June at 6pm. Free tickets to our opening night are available here.

Curated by Holocaust Centre North’s Paula Kolar, Memorial Gestures has been generously supported by The Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation, Arts Council England, The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and the Henry Moore Foundation.

Throughout the exhibition, Holocaust Centre North will host public and private events, talks, and tours designed to engage diverse communities with contemporary art and narratives of migration, persecution, resilience, and survival.

Featured Artworks

  • 1. The Gaps Between the Unforgettable (2023) – April Forrest Lin æž—æŁź

    Video
    5 min 13 sec
    Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Black, Kubie, and Simon families

    The Gaps Between the Unforgettable explores Holocaust Centre North’s conflicting and complex position as steward and curator of public memory. Materials from the archive are enlarged, held, and repositioned – an invitation to consider the care, labour, and intention that goes behind sustaining an archive and the stories it contains. Simultaneously, The Gaps Between the Unforgettable urges us to consider a formation of history that also includes those who do not get to be documented, and whose images do not survive long enough to become archivable.

    With thanks to the Black, Kubie, and Eger families whose collections
    feature in the work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

    Shown in the film is a toy fort that Tom Kubie won and played with as a young child. Tom, his parents and his elder brothers came to the UK as refugees from Czechoslovakia in July 1939, when Tom
    was four years old. Many of their extended family were murdered in the Holocaust.
    Holocaust Centre North, courtesy of the Kubie family.

  • 2. If By Night, A Stranger (2025) – Maud Haya-Baviera

    2025. Video
    2 min 51 sec

    Maud Haya-Baviera’s If By Night, A Stranger takes inspiration from
    the letters of Alice Mendel, who sought refuge for herself and her
    daughter following her husband’s incarceration in Buchenwald during
    the November Pogrom in 1938. The video features two women in
    conversation through the lens of the camera, shown in alternating
    frames. One—played by the artist—performs a staged expression
    of emotion; the other attempts to interpret these gestures into
    British Sign Language. As meaning repeatedly slips from reach, both
    women eventually face the camera in silence, caught in a moment
    of helplessness. Played on a loop, the allegory gains in poignancy by
    repeated watch.


    In If By Night, A Stranger, Haya-Baviera gives form to questions
    shared by many of the Memorial Gestures artists: How can we
    translate and communicate the emotions and experiences of
    Holocaust survivors and their murdered relatives? Can we ever
    fully understand?


    This is the first in a series of four works created by Haya-Baviera
    during her residency at Holocaust Centre North.


    With thanks to the Mendel family, whose collection inspired this
    work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

  • 3. Archeology of Absence (2025) – Irina Razumovskaya

    2025. Ceramic slabs, suspended by chain, 70 x 100 x 6 cm.

    “In the back of my mind,” spoken by Charlotte “Lottie” Gross (later
    Gross-Brauer) in the Harris House reunion film, reflects on how
    trauma lives quietly within. These words anchor Irina Razumovskaya’s
    Archaeology of Absence, a deeply affecting installation shaped by
    collections in the Holocaust Centre North Archive and the artist’s
    own grief. Suspended porcelain slabs, echoing window frames,
    form a ghostly house defined by voids. Their dual surfaces speak
    of contrasting worlds: the reverse clad in white tiles, recalling the
    sanitised spaces of arrival at concentration camps; the front cracked
    and marked by traces of hands and scratches, resisting erasure.
    Razumovskaya explores trauma as a lifelong duality, paralleled by
    her own private loss — carried quietly through moments of joy and
    ordinariness. This installation is a sanctuary of memory. As Holocaust
    witnesses fade and history risks distortion, Archaeology of Absence
    offers not spectacle, but presence: a fragile yet insistent reminder
    that silence, too, holds stories.


    With thanks to the Eger family archive whose collection inspired
    this work, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

  • 4. Aching (2024) – Maud Haya-Baviera

    2025. Steel, glazed porcelain and Mason Stains
    10 x 24 x14 cm

    In Maud Haya-Baviera’s Aching, two steel structures, alluding
    to a construct reminiscent of incarceration, replace a plinth,
    which would traditionally be associated with the display of
    sculptural forms. These steel structures host but also separate
    two ceramic hands frozen in an attempt to touch. Their delicate
    and fragile presence is in direct contrast to the harshness of the
    steel. They appear somehow arrested in a moment of peaceful
    gesture, yet something is oozing from one of the hands and a red
    thumb is a sore that the eye can’t ignore. This work emerged from
    a close reading of Alice Mendel’s letters in which she expressed
    her desperate need to leave a country where she felt trapped and
    where she and her loved ones were deeply endangered. Her letters
    are addressed to Gladys Reid, a British woman who with care and
    kindness, redoubled her efforts to save the Mendel family.


    The work speaks of a wound that never fully heals and from which
    pain continues to seep through, but it also evokes a sense of longing,
    of love and the desire for proximity.


    With thanks to the Mendel family, whose collection inspired this
    work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

  • 5. ‘as far as possible’ (2025) – Hannah Machover
    2025. dry point etchings
    sizes varying between 30 x 21 cm – 84 x 42 cm

    Carefully arranged on a display table, the intimate scale of Hannah
    Machover’s etchings invites viewers to lean in. Distilled into potent lines
    are experiences of internment and isolation from loved ones, drawn
    from letters written by Jewish refugees in Britain who were reclassified
    as ‘enemy aliens’ following the country’s entry into the war in 1939. Her
    delicate, complex compositions evoke a sense of confinement and hint
    at vast, interior landscapes of solitude. At once surreal and allegorical,
    Machover’s compositions centre quiet gestures of care and support: a
    parcel thoughtfully wrapped, a shirt mended by a loved one’s hand.


    Each of the twelve etchings draws from a rich constellation of
    references gathered during Machover’s residency. These include letters
    from the Carry Gorney and Heinz Skyte collections in the Holocaust
    Centre North Archive, as well as echoes of lines and imagery found in
    literature, art history, and the stories passed down in Machover’s own
    family, who fled antisemitism in central Europe.


    With thanks to Carry Gorney and the Skyte family whose collections
    inspired this work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive. Table
    by Louie Isaaman-Jones, with initial design by Joseph Bradley Hill.
    Title booklets designed with Joseph Bradley Hill.

    1.1 left sole: ‘My aunties smuggled their jewellery in their underwear, nailed into the soles of their shoes,
    sewn into the lining of their coats’ (30 x 21 cm)
    1.2 right sole: ‘My aunties smuggled their jewellery in their underwear, nailed into the soles of their shoes,
    sewn into the lining of their coats’ (30 x 21 cm)
    1.3 pressed flowers: ‘six beautiful dark red carnations from my lover’ (30 x 21 cm)
    2.1 tear I, barbed wire: ‘The air is very clear.’ (30 x 21 cm)
    2.2 tear II, letter: ‘Your old man at the helm.’ (30 x 21 cm)
    2.3 tear III, parcel: ‘Those are my wishes for today.’ (30 x 21 cm)
    3.1 envelope I, feeding the yarn: ‘We put the parcels together together’ (42 x 30 cm)
    3.2 envelope II, dream at the window: ’The curtains would eventually be drawn’ (42 x 30 cm)
    3.3 envelope III, close fold: ‘Next year I’ll do everything.’ (42 x 30 cm)
    4.1 envelope IV: ’I must shorten this letter’ (84 x 42 cm)
    4.2 envelope V, repaired shirt: ’I’d prefer it if you would keep an eye on buttons and holes’ (84 x 42 cm)
    4.3 envelope VI, opened by censor: ’You know very well how I treasure everything’ (84 x 42 cm)

  • 6. Trying to Bring Back by Magic (2025) – Maud Haya-Baviera 
    2025. Super 8 film transferred to 4K video file, 2 min 36 sec

    Maud Haya-Baviera’s Trying to Bring Back by Magic unfolds in quiet
    loops of 16mm film: split-screen footage in which the artist handles
    replicas of photographs from Holocaust Centre North Archive with a ritualistic, almost spell-like attention. In her hands, black-and-white faces and scenes are conjured, held, and gently made to vanish—appearing like ghosts, disappearing like memories. Set
    against yellow and violet tablecloths, the images glow faintly, as if
    lit from within, fragile and luminous against time.


    The silent footage is accompanied by a melancholic lullaby—a series
    of syllables stitched together into song. Beneath the melody, other
    voices rise and fall, layering the sound like breath, like memory
    passed from one person to another. It is a chorus—a reminder that
    remembrance is a connective experience.


    With tenderness and wry grace, Haya-Baviera takes on a task
    that is, in truth, impossible—but deeply, desperately wished to be
    possible: to conjure the presence of those who are no longer here,
    to reach across time toward lives that ended too soon and too
    brutally. There is no illusion of bringing them back. But in the flicker
    of film, in the hush of an image appearing and disappearing beneath
    her hands, something stirs. She invites us to feel fragile, flickering
    and real traces, and in that invitation, something returns. Not as it
    was, but as it lingers in memory: glowing, weightless, and briefly
    held. Not through magic, but through care.


    With thanks to the Kubie family, whose collection features in this
    work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive. Audio produced
    as part of public workshops held at Manchester Jewish Museum in
    response to letters from Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy
    of Rachel Mendel. Many thanks to the MJM songwriting group.

  • 7. A Glimpse at the Abyss (2025) – Chebo Roitter Pavez
    2025. Installation of pastel drawings on black paper and risograph printed publication 

    Across seven panels, Chebo Roitter Pavez weaves together the
    voices of 16 Holocaust survivors, tracing the spread of Nazi ideology
    across Europe and the escalating discrimination, persecution, and
    violence faced by Jewish communities. Set against black paper, his vivid,
    gestural lines merge writing and drawing into layered visual tapestries
    that foreground the resilience of Jewish life in the face of centuries-old
    antisemitism—and, in particular, the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.


    Roitter Pavez’s aesthetic is grounded in wide-ranging visual research into
    the cultural heritage of European Jewry, from the Middle Ages to the
    early twentieth century. He draws from the work of Jewish artists whose
    legacies persist despite historical efforts to erase them.


    His effort to chronicle the rise of Nazism is also a reflection on the
    persistence of fascist ideologies today, and urges viewers to recognise
    how such narratives can resurface, often in new forms, if left unchallenged.


    With thanks to the families whose collections feature in this work: Liesel
    Carter, John Chillag, Ibi Ginsburg, Arek Hersh, Martin Kapel, Klaus Samson,
    Trude Silman, Ruth & Ernest Sterne & the families of John Martins, Joanna
    Leser, Tom Kubie, Heinz Skyte & Iby Knill – Chris Knill & Pauline Kinch.
    Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

    1 – THERE IS STILL LIGHT, THEREFORE WE CAN SEE. Fortunate enough to tell a story. (150 x 145 cm)


    2 – ALL COLORS ARE PRESENT IN A SINGLE BEAM OF LIGHT. Assimilation and Difference. (150 x 190 cm)


    3 – EVERYTHING IS WITHIN GRAVITY’S PULL – A POINT IS REACHED, BEYOND WHICH THERE IS NO RETURN. Country and city (150 x 75 cm)


    4 – A COLLAPSE THAT TEARS APART THE FABRIC OF SPACE & TIME. Manifestations of violence.(150 x 100 cm)


    5 – SINGULARITY TRIES TO ENGULF MULTIPLICITY. Learning Environment and Yellow Stars.(150 x 100 cm)


    6 – VASTNESS IS CRUMPLED INTO A SINGLE POINT OF INFINITE DENSITY.
    Anschluss, Kristallnacht and 1939. (150 x 150 cm)


    7 – THE VOID WILL REMAIN UNTIL THE END OF TIME, CASTING AN UNKNOWABLE SHADOW.
    The Universal Holocaust (150 x 150 cm)


    A Glimpse at the Abyss – Early recollections of racism, absolute power and instrumentalised cruelty.
    Gold risography over black paper book, 14.85 x 21 cm

  • 8. These Were Not Simple Deaths (2023) – Jordan Baseman
    2023. Video, 20 min 38 sec 

    These Were Not Simple Deaths features Lilian Black OBE, reflecting
    on her father Eugene Black’s experiences during and after the
    Holocaust, as well as her own deep sense of responsibility as the
    daughter of a survivor. Eugene was the only member of his immediate
    family to survive, apart from his elder brother. He was liberated from
    Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after enduring unimaginable
    suffering, including forced labour at Auschwitz-Birkenau.


    In the film, Lilian recounts how she first learned about her father’s
    past by accident during childhood, and how that discovery shaped
    their later journey together to the sites of his imprisonment. Her
    voice is accompanied by images of tall, mature trees moving gently
    in the breeze beneath a deep, midnight blue sky. It is early spring,
    and the trees are just beginning to bud. The camera never reveals
    the ground or surrounding environment—only the crowns of the
    trees, illuminated by golden light, rising above a darkened landscape.
    Gradually, the sound of passing traffic emerges, anchoring the scene
    in the present and hinting at a contemporary, urban setting.


    Lilian Black was a passionate advocate for Holocaust education. She
    served as Chair of the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association
    and was the founding force behind Holocaust Centre North. The
    original audio of her interview, recorded by Dr Tracy Craggs in 2016,
    forms the emotional core of this work.


    With thanks to Lilian Black & Frank Griffiths. Courtesy of Matt’s Gallery
    (London), Jordan Baseman and Holocaust Centre North Archive.

  • 9. Unpicking – The Gannex and I (2025) – Laura Nathan
    2025. Installation 

    Laura Nathan’s site-specific installation Unpicking: The Gannex and I
    interlaces textiles, print, video, sound, and archive photography to tell a
    story of trauma, resilience, and repair—echoing the artist’s own heritage as
    the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.


    Driven by a desire to learn from other survivors and their descendants Nathan
    undertook this exploration through a tactile dialogue with a Gannex coat.
    Gannex fabric was invented by Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor Joseph Kagan
    in 1951 and at the peak of its success the Kagan Textiles Ltd factory employed
    up to 1,000 people in Yorkshire.


    Over the course of eight months, the threads of one coat were picked apart
    alongside the life story of its inventor. The first of two video works in this
    installation shows the artist’s life-sized hands, working to separate panel from
    panel, stitch from stitch, and finally single wefts from warps. Three dry point
    etchings document the marks made by the artist in her rigorous unpicking process.
    The composites of the coat are displayed on a table in neatly arranged piles.


    A second video traces Nathan’s attempt to reweave the fabric on a small loom.
    She knots together salvaged threads, coaxing them back into alignment. The
    result is a delicate and imperfect textile, its uneven weave visibly interrupted by
    the scars of its own making—knots, gaps, and sudden shifts in tension.


    Nathan’s laborious interrogations took place while listening to the words of
    those who worked at Kagan Textiles Ltd and elsewhere in Yorkshire’s textile
    industry. The gallery space (itself an old textile mill) is filled with the sounds of
    weaving looms and the voices of Holocaust survivors, refugees and immigrants
    who built new lives here. This included South Asian migrants who experienced
    the Partition of India in 1947.


    With thanks to the families whose collections feature in this work: Ibi & Val
    Ginsburg, Hannah Goldstone & Mike Wertheim, Jen Kagan, Iby Knill, Chris Knill,
    Pauline Kinch, and Julia Kinch. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive


    White Line Project, held by Heritage Quay at the University of Huddersfield: Dr Nasim
    Hasnie, Mohammed Hanif Asad, Sajida Ismail, Mahamood Kler, Gian Singh Sahota.

  • 10. Manny (2025) – Ariane Schick
    2025. Installation of carpet, table, overhead lamp, projection, and artist book 

    Interrupting the gallery space with its vivid orange carpet, Ariane
    Schick’s installation invites visitors into a snapshot of the life of
    Emanuel Culman and his parents, Holocaust survivors Edith and
    Emil Culman. Emanuel—known as ‘Manny’ to friends and family—lends
    his name to the installation and its two parts: a book and a frame-by-frame animation. Contrasting in their approach to time, emotion, and form, the two works offer a complementary perspective on
    intergenerational trauma. The installation is shaped in part by Schick’s
    own family history as the descendant of Holocaust refugees.


    Manny (book) is a tender and expansive portrait of a family, beginning
    with Manny’s birth in 1945 and ending with his death. Across 750
    pages, letters and notes between Manny and his parents trace
    a lifelong bond—filled with love, frustration, humour, and longing.
    Too vast to read straight through, the book invites quiet moments of
    discovery, as readers encounter Manny’s voice in vivid, personal letters
    sent from the U.S. to his parents in Leeds. Alongside these, Schick
    includes a selection of photographs by Edith Culman. Hundreds of
    such images, now held in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, depict
    everyday life with warmth, humour, and a striking emotional sensitivity.


    Superimposed onto Manny (book) is a frame-by-frame animation of
    the same name. Inspired by a drawing from the Culman collection,
    Schick brings to life an anthropomorphised 1970s American car, whose
    shifting expressions—joy, love, confusion, sadness—play out as its
    wheels continue to turn.


    By focusing on the post-1945 lives of Edith, Emil, and Manny, Ariane
    Schick invites us into a story of survival rarely told–a story that
    celebrates ordinary and universal human experiences in the wake of
    trauma and honours the lasting contributions to art, counterculture
    and community made by Holocaust survivors.


    With thanks to the Culman family who collection features in this work.
    Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

  • 11. The Artist and the FĂŒhrer (2025)  – Sierra Kaag
    2025. Wooden plinth with book and projection of film produced by Sierra Kaag and Paula Kolar 

    Sierra Kaag’s work-in-progress explores the journeys of objects
    from their origins, through the Holocaust, to their arrival in the
    Holocaust Centre North Archive. Her focus is a collection of
    books that once belonged to Hugo Friedmann, brought by him
    into the ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt and used as part of a
    small library there.


    For this exhibition, Kaag draws attention to a single title: Der KĂŒnstler
    und der FĂŒhrer (The Artist and the Leader) by Max Liebermann.
    She presents a copy of the same edition held in the Holocaust
    Centre North Archive, originally donated by the Kubie family. The
    accompanying film, created in collaboration with curator Paula
    Kolar, reflects on the journey of the Friedmann family, the trajectory
    of the books, and the threads that bind them.


    With thanks to the Kubie family whose collection features in this
    work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.


    Film contains excerpt from ‘Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film,
    1944’ by Kurt Gerron and Ivan Fric. Archival reference: RG-60.0269.
    Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    The book, ‘Der KĂŒnstler und der FĂŒhrer’ (The Artist and the Leader), by Max Liebermann,
    belonged to Hugo Friedmann, uncle of child refugee Tom Kubie. Hugo, his wife Hildegard
    and their children Hans Georg and Liselotte were deported from Vienna to Theresienstadt ghetto-camp in 1942. Much to Hildegard’s dismay, Hugo used much of his luggage allowance to bring his books into Theresienstadt with him. The couple were later deported to Auschwitz, where Hildegard was murdered in October 1944. Hugo died in the Kaufering subcamp of Dachau in 1945. Another copy of the same edition as that held in the Holocaust Centre North Archive is on display in this installation.


    Holocaust Centre North, courtesy of the Kubie family.

  • 12. Hard Lands (2025)  – Maud Haya-Baviera
    2025. Video, 4 min 32 sec 

    Hard Lands was filmed on the site of a former concentration
    camp and features haunting images of a desolate French
    countryside in winter. It is here that the artist’s grandfather
    was interned during the Second World War.


    The traces of the camp are just visible in the overgrown structures
    and abandoned houses – their windows either boarded up or existing
    as gaping openings to a dark emptiness within. The accompanying
    soundtrack consists of a sweeping and relentless melody, created
    by a synthetic chorus. It highlights and contrasts the lifeless
    visuals, drawing out the emotions and experiences buried deep in
    the foundations of the landscape.


    On her pilgrimage the artist encountered others who had travelled
    to the site, seeking to see what is no longer there. Hard Lands is the final and most personal of the works presented by Haya-Baviera in this exhibition. It was also the first work the artist made during her residency, a personal overture of sorts, setting the tone for a body of work that rings and wrings with the urgency
    of mediating Holocaust history at a time when racist and anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise across Europe.

  • 13. ‘§175’ (2025) – Matt Smith 
    2025. Printed photographs mounted on boards, ceramic tiles with graphite inscriptions, kiln fired and mounted on board. 65 x 60 cm 

    §175 was the legal code used to criminalise same-sex desire in Germany.
    Originally implemented in the 19th century, it was fervently expanded and
    strictly enforced under Nazi rule. Matt J Smith’s §175 consists of three works
    combining ceramics and photographic collage.


    At the centre of the installation, small clay brick tiles form a blank grid. From
    a list of 231 pink triangle prisoners murdered in a Sachsenhausen subcamp,
    175 names were carefully inscribed in graphite. During firing, the graphite
    burned away—erasing the record, as their lives had been.


    In 1935, §175 was expanded upon: men could now be imprisoned for 5 years
    for a quick kiss or a touch that lingered too long. By 1944 no physical contact
    needed to have taken place, with just the intention of homosexual behaviour
    enough to lead to incarceration.


    The photographs on the left panel show images from Holocaust Centre
    North’s Archive. In these photos same sex desire could be inferred, even if
    they depict groups of friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters or cousins. None
    of the individuals shown are known to have been gay. And yet, in a culture of
    widespread surveillance and persecution, even innocent gestures of affection
    between people of the same sex could become subject to scrutiny.


    Smith’s work reflects on how such a culture of generalised suspicion affected
    those directly targeted, but also shaped how people related to each other
    more broadly—how they moved, how they touched, how they were seen.
    His interest lies in understanding how persecution reshaped behaviours,
    relationships, and the meanings that could be projected onto ordinary images.


    In the Holocaust Centre North Archive, the belongings of Jewish victims of
    Nazi persecution are cared for and their memories are protected by loved
    ones. Each family was contacted before the use of photographs was granted.


    The panel to the right depicts two images from a Nazi medical publication.
    Some pink triangle prisoners were offered potential early release from camps
    if they agreed to castration. The images show the same pink triangle prisoner
    before and after being castrated. We do not know his name and can only assume
    his permission was not sought before publication. Unwilling to reproduce the
    framed images, the artist cut them from the pages of the original publication.

    The persecution of gay men did not end at liberation. Surviving pink triangle
    prisoners after liberation from concentration camps were often rearrested
    based on Nazi evidence and reimprisoned if they had not completed their
    sentence. §175 remained in the West German criminal code until 1994.
    Shame stopped many families reuniting with their pink triangle relatives
    or remembering them publicly, perpetuating the erasure of their lives and
    suffering from collective memory.


    With thanks to the families whose collections feature in this work: Vera Banasch,
    Michelle Green, John Martins and family, Edith Spencer, and the Dalton, Hartland
    and Lennard families. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

  • 14. Space Between (2023) – Laura Fisher
    2023. Monotypes on 240 gsm Arches Johannot paper, 56 x 76 cm. Graphite on 160gsm Velin d’Arches paper, 48 x 64 cm 

    Space Between is a series of monotypes which mediate the
    relationship between loss and presence. Created in March 2023
    with collaboration from Tom Kubie–a Holocaust survivor who
    escaped to England from Czechoslovakia with his family in 1939.
    This series is based on the hand gestures of Tom’s family members,
    traced from photographs in albums that were recovered after the
    war.


    The images offer an intimate elegy to a lost world, capturing
    moments of tenderness and affection preserved in prewar family
    snapshots. In these drawings, attention is given to what often
    goes unnoticed—the space between hands, the gaps in memory,
    the outlines of what once was. Here, the visible shapes suggest
    memory and presence; the spaces around them speak to absence
    and the things we cannot fully know.


    With thanks to the Kubie family whose collection inspired this work.
    Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

  • 15. Tausend KĂŒsse (2023) – Laura Fisher
    2023. Artist book, cotton thread embroidered on wool felt, 15 x 17 x 2.5 cm 

    This artist’s book is based on a photograph and letter given
    by Hilel Erner to his wife and children before the family were
    separated in 1940. Using a printed scan of the letter as a guide,
    Laura Fisher carefully embroidered Hilel’s handwritten words in
    thread, preserving both his message and his handwriting through
    touch and time.

    The letter reads:
    Damit meine beiden Kinder nicht vergessen wie ihr Papa aussieht
    schicke ich dieses Bild, in der Hoffnung das sie es genau so
    lieb haben wie als ich bei euch wĂ€re. Tausend KĂŒsse und alles
    gute fĂŒr mein(e) Frau und die Kinder. Hilel


    English translation:
    So that my two children do not forget what their papa looks
    like, I send this picture, in the hope that they will hold it
    just as dear as if I were with you. A thousand kisses and all
    good wishes for my wife and the children. Hilel


    The field of small red x’s embroidered on the cover of the book
    references the phrase Tausend KĂŒsse (A Thousand Kisses), from
    which the piece takes its name.


    With thanks to the Erner family whose collection features in this
    work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

  • 16. Red Cross Blankets (2023) – Laura Fisher
    2023. Knitted blankets,100% combed cotton yarn, 80 x 136 cm, 150 x 250 cm 

    These knitted blankets are based on telegrams and letters
    in the Holocaust Centre North Archive. Often sent through
    organisations like the Red Cross, these brief messages were
    sometimes the only way for people imprisoned in concentration
    camps to reach their loved ones.
    Though limited in words, the messages carried deep feelings—of
    warmth, hope, and solidarity. Faithfully magnified in the form of
    knitted blankets, the artwork gives physical presence to these
    fragile connections, with the aim of honouring the human need for
    closeness in the face of separation and uncertainty.

    MILLIONEN KÜSSE AUCH EUER BRUDER. Mama
    With thanks to Michelle Green, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

    English translation:
    Dearest children. I’m very
    worried, last message from
    March. We’re all healthy. I
    hope you are too. Message
    from Dad: A million kisses.
    Your brother too, Mum.

    Telegram donated by second-generation Holocaust survivor, Michelle Green.
    Michelle’s grandmother Gisella sent this telegram from Belgium to Michelle’s aunt, Aranka
    in Harrogate. Aranka, along with Michelle’s mother, Lili, came to the UK to work in domestic
    service in 1938-1939. Tragically, the family left behind, including Michelle’s grandparents,
    Gisella and Josef, as well as her uncle Kurt, were murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
    Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of Michelle Green.


    Heaps of love kisses yours henry mendel
    With thanks to Rachel Mendel, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.


    Hast du nicht Schnackerl?
    With thanks to the the Kubie family, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.


    23.4.34
    With thanks to the Kubie family, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.


    To wish you a prosperous life
    With thanks to the Kubie family, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

  • 17. Conversation Time (2025) – Rey Conquer
    Paperback publication, translations of archive letters with translator essay. Text excerpts installed on gallery windows, vinyl on glass.

    Conversation Time is a collection of translations from letters
    held in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, written between
    1938-1945 by refugees from and victims of Nazi persecution. The
    selection focuses on greetings, formulae, writing about writing –
    the ordinary and repeated phrases that people used to express
    themselves to friends and family members from whom they were
    separated, not knowing when or if they would receive a reply.
    Stories of displacement and persecution, anxiety and longing are
    communicated indirectly, pressing through from behind the written
    repetitions and everyday language visible to us through the letters’
    dates.


    An afterword relates the experience of the residency and the
    challenges of translating these letters in the present day – how to
    convey the ordinariness, what it means to be a human translator in an
    age of machines, and how to let the resonances between the letters,
    and between the letters and present day experiences, sound out.


    With thanks to Elisabeth Bernheim, Michelle Green, Martin Hyman,
    Joanna Leser, D. Rivlin, Trude Silman and the Anysz, Hartland, Kubie,
    Leser, Schatzberger and Vernon families. Courtesy of Holocaust
    Centre North Archive.

  • 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.

    1. 19. Klutz (2025) – Tom Hastings
      2025. Paperback publication, creative non-fiction 

      Klutz is a dazzling, unsettling work of memoir, travel writing, and
      cultural criticism that begins in the Holocaust Centre North
      Archive in Huddersfield and leads to the haunted streets of Berlin.
      Midway through a residency, Tom Hastings discovers that his
      grandmother once lived just a short walk from Else Lubranczyk, a
      Jewish seamstress whose letters—preserved in the archive—were
      written to her daughter who fled Nazi Germany in 1939, a year
      after Hastings’ own grandmother.


      Else and her niece, Steffi Levy, were deported to Theresienstadt
      in 1943. Following the traces left in Else’s letters—of ordinary life,
      longing, recrimination, and attempts to escape—Hastings walks
      the streets, visits the shops, and reads the memorial plaques that
      now mark a vanished world.


      What unfolds is a deeply personal journey: a reckoning with Jewish
      inheritance, uneasy memory, and the crackdown on solidarity. Klutz
      is about stumbling toward something and not getting there—and
      finding something else instead.


      With thanks to Barry Anysz whose collection features in this work.
      Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.


      Buy the book & support Holocaust Centre North at:
      https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/shop/

    2. 20. Poetry After Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde (2024) – Ben Barkow
      2024. Paperback publication, poetry 

      A series of linked poems, in which Ben Barkow explores the
      lives of his grandparents and their siblings and those of his
      parents. By directly going up against Adorno’s famous dictum that
      to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric, he probes the
      limits of representation in the context of the overwhelming need
      to let the suffering of the victims speak. Implicitly he articulates
      the haunting and haunted reality of a life lived in the long shadow
      of the Holocaust.


      With thanks to M., H., and B. Barkow.

      Buy the book & support Holocaust Centre North at:
      https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/shop/