Taken from The Warburg Institute website.
Both Conquer and Hastings respond to letters, postcards and telegrams sent between 1938 and 1946 from the Holocaust Centre North Archive—intimate wartime correspondences between parents and children, cousins, lovers, and friends. Each writer starts in the archive and moves outwards, to the Isle of Man and as far as Berlin, trying to understand the letters in their historical and topographical specificity. Thinking with works of art, literature and theory, the books address questions of historicity, translation, Jewish identity, and the difficulties of responding to the archive in the present.
Published by Holocaust Centre North, Conversation Time and Klutz are the first books to emerge from the Memorial Gestures Residency Programme, which supports artists, writers, and translators to work with the Centre’s archive, creating new forms of memory that bridge history and the present.
At the launch, Conquer and Hastings will be joined in conversation by writer, art historian and curator Rebecca Birrell. Please join us for discussion followed by Q&A and drinks.
Rey Conquer is a writer from Nottingham, living in London. Their first book was an academic study of German poetry, Reading Colour. A novel, How to Live Together, and a book of essays are coming out with Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Tom Hastings is a writer from London. He holds a PhD in History of Art and is Lecturer in Dance at The Place, London. Klutz is his first book.
Rebecca Birrell’s first book This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early 20th Century was published by Bloomsbury in 2021 and named Art Book of the Year by the Guardian/Observer who described it as ‘a striking act of collective empathy.’ Birrell’s curatorial projects included work at The Charleston Trust, The Department of Prints and Drawings at The British Museum and the Jewish Museum in London.
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