Memorial Gestures runs from Friday 6 to Saturday 28 June 2025 at The 1912 Mill, Sunny Bank Mills, Farsley, Pudsey, West Yorkshire. The exhibition opens Thursday 5 June at 6pm. Free tickets to the opening night are available [here].
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, Maud Haya-Baviera, Sierra Kaag, April Forrest Lin 林森, Hannah Machover, Laura Nathan, Nathalie Olah, Irina Razumovskaya, Chebo Roitter Pavez, Matt 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 the Centre to share works-in-progress from their forthcoming book-length projects.
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.
Want to visit with a group? Contact us at hcn@hud.ac.uk