Memorial Gestures

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Emotive artefacts including letters posted from Nazi concentration camps have inspired a temporary exhibition in Huddersfield.

The project - called Memorial Gestures - has seen three artists take up residency at the Holocaust Centre North archive and visitors' centre for six months.

Working alongside the Centre's small team, Holocaust survivors and their families, their mission was to explore how art can be used help to keep survivors' stories alive once the generation that directly experienced the Nazi genocide is no longer around to tell their stories directly.

With the end of WWII now 78 years ago, the youngest Holocaust survivors with any memories of the period are now in their 80s, whilst their children - the second generation - are aged 60+.

Artists Jordan Baseman, Laura Fisher and April Lin spent time getting to know the Centre’s public and archived collections, which feature thousands of photographs, letters, objects and audio and video interviews with survivors. In response, they produced a number of works of art including textiles, video, sound, sculpture and prints. The exhibition was masterminded by Centre director Alessandro Bucci and has been curated by Paula Kolar.

For artist Laura Fisher, it was learning of West Yorkshire's rich textile heritage that led her to create a number of tactile objects for the exhibition, including blankets and a felt book.

Stitched into her colourful cotton knitted blankets are reproductions of handwritten words, sent in letters from men imprisoned in concentration camps to their loved ones in the outside world. They read Millionen kusse auch euer bruder (Millions of kisses to your brother too) and Ich warte sehnsuchtig auf nachricht von euch (I longingly wait for a message from you).

The other two artists turned to the moving image. April Lin's multi-channel video installation In The Memory House explores the role of the northern Holocaust archive as a portal between past and the present. It features recent footage shot by the artist of Holocaust survivors, now in their 80s and 90s, alongside photographs and objects from the archive that illuminate their earlier lives.

And Jordan Baseman's video These Were Not Simple Deaths takes as its starting point a 2016 interview with Lilian Black OBE. Daughter of a Bergen-Belsen concentration camp survivor, Lilian was founder of Holocaust Centre North and died from Covid 19 in 2020 at the age of just 69. As Lilian speaks about her accidental discovery of her father Eugene Black’s experiences as a prisoner, we see ancient trees, just coming into leaf.

Memorial Gestures is at Dai Hall, Piazza Shopping Centre, Unit 29/30, Victoria Lane, Huddersfield HD1 2QF until 27 May 2023 when it moves to Holocaust Centre North until 27 July 2023