Dr Alessandro Bucci, the Director of Holocaust Centre North, is one member of an inspirational group that today (6 June) premiere their Memorial Gestures exhibition to the public – at Sunny Bank Mills’ 1912 Mill.
The exhibition represents the culmination of a three-year, unique residency programme (also called Memorial Gestures) developed by Holocaust Centre North to provide a meaningful platform for both emerging and established artists to reflect on - and respond to – the Holocaust and its commemoration, through their own artistic and creative practice.
Through unparallelled access to both Holocaust Centre North's archive and by talking directly with survivors and families, the eclectic group of fourteen international artists, translators and writers have produced the most moving, informative, engaging and intimate works -that create within the 1912 Mill building, a space for the rest of us to pause, reflect, and consider how our past is very much entwined with our present.
And as we absorb the memories within this West Yorkshire millstone-grit building, it is entirely fitting that Dr Bucci reminds us of the origins of Holocaust Centre North:
“A group of [Holocaust] survivors based in Leeds came together in the mid-90s, in the spirit of mutual support and friendship. The Holocaust wasn’t spoken about then, as much as it is today.
“In the 90s in the UK and the west, you think of a generation of growth and pop culture, but in reality, it was also a decade of genocide. There was genocide happening in Europe, in Africa - and the survivors at that point decided to come together and share their stories with the simple ambition that the world become more compassionate. And that has been a guiding light for us [at Holocaust Centre North].”
After initially staging a temporary exhibition, it became clear that a more permanent facility and gathering place was needed - and opening in 2018 within the University of Huddersfield campus, Holocaust Centre North rapidly developed – including the establishment of a globally vital archive.
Dr Bucci: “We’re not a memorial site, so the emphasis of the legacy of the holocaust is very important to us - the traces of inter-generational memory and trauma.
“While the archive is a testament to things that are here and the people who survived, we’re also very clear that it is in a way, an exception to the things that can’t be here. The things that have been destroyed or stolen – or cannot be in the archive.
“That was the entry point into ‘What can we do to honour that?’ - and the Memorial Gestures programme tries to answer that in part. It also tries to answer other questions: How do we foster responsible cultural care when we deal with other people’s stories - and stories of trauma? Who can tell us about stories - now they are no longer increasingly able to tell their own stories?
“Our Curator Paula Kolar began reflecting on these questions - initially on ad-hoc projects and initiatives and then we thought the topic of how to answer these questions needed a container - and we soon realised that working with art and artists gave us the language - that language ‘proper’ didn’t give us. The limitations of language are very much visible when you are dealing with trauma.
“Fewer survivors are able to tell their stories. Survivors are diminishing. It's been eighty years since the liberation of the camps. We are wondering, like many other organisations in the field: who will [continue to] tell their stories? We thought that the artists could become spokespeople for survival stories. We wanted to explore the limitations of language as well, which I think is quite evident [throughout the exhibition].
“What you can see here is the outcome of a programme in which artists spent months with us in our archive. We've learned so much in-turn: not only about our making, but also about our own collections. The stories that we didn’t know, because so far nobody had the time to look at them so closely.
“I feel the number one thing that we have learned is we learned a lot about care. We learned a lot about the care that you have to take in telling other people's stories. Particularly where there are stories of trauma.
“We also learned how many people are interested in care – and passionate about this history but weren't engaged before. It’s raised the question: why is that? We need to explore this.”
Artists Jordan Baseman, Laura Fisher, April Lin 林森 Maud Haya-Baviera, Irina Razumovskaya, Matt Smith, Ariane Schick, Tom Hastings, Rey Conquer, Hannah Machover, Laura Nathan, Chebo Roitter Pavez, Sierra Kaag, and Nathalie Olah have each, individually created intensely powerful works, that when viewed collectively, cannot fail to illicit an emotional response from the viewer.
Ariane Shick’s sumptuous, circular orange carpet, carefully fitted around the mill’s original iron columns – and accompanied by an overhead lamp and three heavyweight books, disrupts the austere post-industrial space (as does Laura Fisher’s exquisite Red Cross Blankets installation).
‘Manny’ is described as a tender and expansive portrait of a family. Visitors are invited to participate in an intimate snapshot of the life of the Culman family: Emanuel and his parents Edith and Emil.
Arrested during the November Pogrom in 1938, Emil was sent to Dachau, but subsequently travelled to the UK in 1939, where he met Edith at a kibbutz in St Albans. The couple subsequently made their home in Leeds, which gives this work a solemnity that transcends the homely décor.
Captivated, I listen intently as Ariane Schick ‘walks’ me through the journey that has brought her to Farsley:
“The intro is just a few lines, so, I'm just going to read it to you: It's a compilation of reproductions from the Culman Collection held at the archive. The compiled documents were sent by Emmanuel Culman - the only son of Edith and Emil Culman. Emmanuel signed his letters as Manny. He sent many letters to his parents after he moved to the U.S. while his parents remained in the UK.
In this book many letters have been placed chronologically quite strictly and they are also accompanied in no particular order by photographs, taken by his mother Edith.”
“And so, my work was really just a framing of this, in that it echoes my experience in the archive. I wanted to see them chronologically. To experience them, in that unfolding of time."
Emanuel became a successful writer and playwright in Los Angeles, but it is Culman’s dialogue with his parents over many years that became Shick’s focus. His professional life is referenced by the projection of an animated car, that perhaps acts as an accidental nucleus for the work.
Shick: “This car obviously wasn't animated. I did that. It [the original artwork] was from a poster for one of his plays - and with the characters sort of ‘making out’ in the car - and I just wanted to animate it. The whole thing together is an immersion into this person and his life, but also into his relationships - and also in a way, my relationship with the archives.
“We were held back from the archive initially for a couple of months into the residency. Before that, we had met up, we discussed, we read. We were given a bibliography to explore, so I came to it with my own version of what it means to think about and study the Holocaust.
“I was the most interested in the notions of post-memory, the memory of the Holocaust by those who didn't experience it and the second-generation experience that would be someone like Manny. The third-generation (his children) don't really feature in that, but by being present here in 2025, we're bringing it forward just to see what those ‘ripple effects’ look like.
“From my reading into the archive - and in the first conversation with Hari, the archivist at Holocaust Centre North, I was looking for a ‘key’ or ‘way in’. Small things that might allow me to bypass the bulk - to form a more immediate connection.
“I'd come across a pressed Four-Leaf-Clover that comes from a more personal family archive. I was describing these feelings and thought I was almost looking for literal keys - but when Hari introduced me to Edith, (the mother of Manny) - who was very creative - and had created a lot. She clearly took photographs, but she also did textile work and collages. When I saw those: that felt like a connection - an impulse to do something.
“At that point, the Culman family archive was in my field of vision. I wasn't really seeing anything else. Even though I loved it, I felt like Edith had done that work. Emil too had done a lot of creative writing and wrote short stories, but when I found these works from Manny: because of my interest in that post-memory idea and that rippling idea, all the parts started coming together. It just felt very natural to focus on Manny and stay with him.”
Ariane Schick describes her creative practice as ‘non-linear’. Her installation consists of accomplished examples of both bookmaking and animation - but she explains this is her first time attempting either discipline. Clear that her aim was to create something and a space for it to be held - she has excelled at fostering an overwhelming sense of intimacy and connection with her work.
Although mindful that her work might be questioned as less relevant than the obvious headline horrors of the Holocaust by some, because of its focus on the period between 1945 and 2022 – and not the preceding years of conflict, Schick is unequivocal: “By its very existence I'm saying: ‘yes, it is’. It does. It's again a spotlight. There's a spotlight on the further ripples. The things that are just outside of what people usually look at. The zone outside of the zone. Just go a little bit outside of what you usually think of as Holocaust history. To broaden that slightly is an aim. A proposition of the work.
“Again, I'm not here to make to make judgments, but I think that it's like a plant’s root. You have a tap root and then you've got all the other, smaller roots and the smaller roots are just as important. They're the ones feeding into the central idea, so you need as many perspectives on something as possible.”
Shick references Imre Kertész’ 1975 book To Be Without Destiny : “I know about the numbers. The big ‘H’ of horrors, but in the book the main character is pursued by a journalist who is insistent that the realities of the camps must be communicated to the world. But they can’t be. How can you imagine what it was like? The journalist couldn’t – and so I was also thinking about the numbers – but it’s beyond what we can imagine.”
Ariane Schick’s extensive body of work has been described previously as: ‘activating muscle memory by engaging the viewer’s emotions, memories and desires, both learned and programmed.’ A hypothesis that must be engaged with this month at Sunny Bank Mills.
As you might expect: the Memorial Gestures exhibition supplies ‘juxtaposition’ in buckets. Trying at length to avoid this often-over-used noun - it’s clear won’t be possible - when moving from the comfort and warmth of Manny’s carpet to the unsettling installation of Irina Razumovskaya’s ‘Archaeology of Absence’:
The London-based, St Petersburg-raised artist leaves viewers of her work confronting unmistakable facsimiles of stark, white-tiled concentration camp walls as the installation is viewed from its exterior.
Ceramic slabs suspended by chains – are both windows and gravestones, in a property that is defined by what is missing. An introduction to Razumovskaya’s personal and professional journey, both before – and during Memorial Gestures, is an essential companion to her work:
“I've been working with ceramic sculpture for the last fifteen years. Depending on the projects, which sometimes are things around our cultural identity, or female identities - I work through the language of material. I use ceramic as a metaphor for a lot of things: fragility or malleability - violence and trauma - if I can sum it up, this is kind of what my practice is about.”
The artist confirms there was a lightbulb moment for her when she was first introduced to the archive:
“It was a very intense moment, because the reason why I wanted to apply to this residency was because I'm Jewish myself and I've researched the Holocaust – so it is part of my thinking, but I thought about how it is viewed now by a young person: “Yeah, it’s very sad, but it’s history, right?”
“I've been quite sheltered in my life, but I have experienced loss myself. I lost my first daughter. So, when I was coming to this, I could really understand a lot of things that maybe if I was young or previously would have seemed really abstract. I think this was kind of the driving force and so for me it has been a very intense journey.
“On one hand, while processing my own loss, I was reading about people's experiences, how they continued to live after this trauma. It was really relatable. At the same time, there was also kind of hope, because when I started the residency, I discovered I was pregnant. I was coming to the archive and immersing myself into this reality. So, it was really a moment for me.
“A lot of stories [from the archive] that I've seen were really very ordinary. Some memories were funny. Somebody was dreaming of buying a Rolls Royce while talking about their experience as a Kindertransport survivor. They seemed really normal and I think this was the biggest discovery for me that, you know, it's not always like the Anne Frank Diary and this kind of narrative.
“How people learn to live with [trauma] and they just build their normal realities around that, but there is always this kind of second side, there is always this double layer that persists and I could really sense it, because I think I could relate to it.
“So, in this project, it's called Archaeology of Absence. I wanted to honour this space, that sometimes is not really talked about in a society, especially in England, because I find that people are quite reserved and don't like to talk about their feelings and emotions.
“And I feel like this aspect of trauma, for people who live with it - this is what makes them slightly ‘Normal and Not Normal’. I wanted to honour that dichotomy. That duality arises, and that's why I thought of this space (that is actually a reverse of the space). One view is like a house or a room, but the physical representation: it's the voids, it's the windows and the same time, they're like graves.
“And I wanted them to be double-sided, so the outer side is tiled. It’s kind of clinical - and it references the Sanitising Rooms that I saw in the archive in the photos of camps. The place people had to enter and cleanse. Cleansing that also stripped people of their identity and their entity.
“Inside I wanted it to show cracking. I want it to be visceral, so it is the kind of images that slowly deteriorate. It’s cracked and there are hand and fingerprints. It’s as if somebody's trying to get out of the space.
“It's very visceral - for me, a literal depiction of this duality. And then when the pieces came out, I also realised, that I wanted to fix some cracks, so I've used pewter - which is an eighteenth-century technique for repairing ceramics. There’s a history in Europe of fixing and mending ceramics with pewter, just literally to preserve and to save it. I thought that this is like a beautiful metaphor for preserving this memory and trying to make sense of it. Trying to sort of fix it.”
The Memorial Gestures exhibition is curated by Holocaust Centre North’s Paula Kolar and can be viewed at the 1912 Mill, Sunny Bank Mills, LS28 5UJ from 6-28 June.
As part of its month long run at Sunny Bank Mills - Holocaust Centre North is delighted to announce two free public events which will take place alongside the Memorial Gestures exhibition, enabling visitors and audiences an up close and intimate look at the work with some of those responsible for its creation.
On Saturday June 21, [GT1] Memorial Gestures Curator, Paula Kolar, will be In Conversation at the gallery at 1pm,with the Centre’s Head of Programming, Greg Thorpe. Together they will discuss Holocaust Centre North’s unique Memorial Gestures artistic residency programme which has resulted in this final group art show of the same name.
Over the past three years, they have worked with emerging artists, writers and translators to directly respond to Holocaust archives through creative means - addressing the ever-increasing importance of Holocaust commemoration through artistic practice. Their conversation event at Sunny Bank Mills will reflect on the exhibition, the residency programme, artist development and the reasons for working with archives of trauma, loss and survival through art. This one-off event will shed light on Holocaust Centre North’s innovative Memorial Gestures programme, exploring contemporary responses to Holocaust History through art.
On June 25, artist Laura Nathan will be In Conversation at 6pm at Sunny Bank Mills as she shares her very personal journey of self-discovery as a Memorial Gestures resident artist.
For her final piece as part of this exhibition, she embarked upon a physical and metaphorical journey of unpicking. As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Laura’s work stems from a need to unpick and interrogate her past and its impact today. Laura first approached the Holocaust Centre North Archive to help her learn from the experiences of other survivors and their families. Her explorations since have revolved around the textile industry in Yorkshire, notably Kagan Textiles Ltd. where Gannex fabric was invented. The Kagan family story is one of the 16 survivor stories central to Through Our Eyes, the permanent exhibition at Holocaust Centre North.
Laura’s residency work has centred around the laborious unpicking and reconstructing of a Gannex coat, performed whilst listening to stories of those intertwined through threads of the past. For this one-off event, Laura will share her process of unpicking, discovery, remaking, and repairing broken threads. She will reflect how these actions helped her process the experiences of others, whilst gaining insight into her own family’s story.
Tickets for both these events are free but registration is essential as spaces are limited. Booking is not required to view the Memorial Gestures exhibition at Sunny Bank Mills.
Event attendees are welcome to visit the exhibition prior to or following the events.
Memorial Gestures runs from Friday 6 to Saturday 28June 2025 at the 1912 Mill at Sunny Bank Mills, Farsley, Pudsey, West Yorkshire,LS28 5UJ.
Tues–Sat: 10am–4pm | Thurs: 10am–7pm | Sun: 12–4pm |Mon: Closed
Header Image: Installation view from Memorial Gestures exhibition curated by Holocaust Centre North featuring works by various artists as they take shape in the Sunny Bank Mills Gallery space
