Memorial Gestures.

Holocaust Centre North, housed at the University of Huddersfield, is home to an extraordinary archive of thousands of personal artefacts belonging to survivors of the Holocaust who made new lives in the north of England.

In order to keep the archive active, public, and vitally engaged with, the Centre operates a unique residency programme, inviting international artists and writers to spend time in the archives and respond to the materials they find there.

The residency programme, known as Memorial Gestures, produced extraordinary work in its first three years which was then brought together in public for the first time at a group show, also named Memorial Gestures, and hosted at Sunny Bank Mills in Farsley, Leeds in June of 2025.

I was honoured to work as Producer on the show, collaborating closely with curator Paula Kolar and gallery technician Alex Wilson. The exhibition encompassed film, textile, drawing, writing, print, audio, installation, music, performance, talks, workshops, and more. The broad variety of responses from the collective of artists breathed new life and brought new awareness to the extraordinary stories of Holocaust survivors, their families, and their legacies.

For the duration of the show we had extraordinary engagement, important conversations, and many moving exchanges, in what we believe is the first and only UK show of its kind in which artists were responding exclusively to Holocaust materials in the UK.

The artist residencies are planned to continue into the future and you can find out more here. I also highly recommend a visit to Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield to experience the museum there and to learn more about their work and how they are safeguarding local stories that are of global importance.