I am at an event exploring the latest iteration of the residency programme Memorial Gestures at Holocaust Centre North. Selected from an open call, the residencies offer a durational experience to respond to stories and artefacts from Holocaust survivors and their families. Alongside artists, this year’s programme will also be inviting a writer and a translator to creatively respond to the archives.
Contextualising the programme, the Centre’s director Dr. Alessandro Bucci says: ‘For me it is very important to invite external perspectives to look at the collections with new eyes.’ Later, Development Coordinator Andrew Key explains the structure of the residencies: ‘We have four artists this year and it’s a nine month residency. We have a programme of guided reading, five workshops at the Centre about Jewish culture, Jewish history, Holocaust history, oral history and testimony.’ This will then be followed by a period of independent research, a production period, and then another event in May. There will be a period of working with families of survivors in relation to material from the archives, and finally an exhibition of the artists’ work in September. Key describes the role of archivist Hari Jonkers as a collaborative one, working with the artist and their specific creative interests – maybe suggesting specific artefacts in response to themes or material the artist is interested in.
Artists Maud Haya-Baviera, Irina Razumovskaya, Ariane Schick and Matt Smith are this year’s residency selection and, having spent some time with the archives and archivist, are about to begin the making process. It is at this pivotal juncture we have the pleasure of finding out more about each artist and what has resonated with them in the archive so far.
Maud Haya-Baviera is a French born, Sheffield-based interdisciplinary artist who often works in photography and film. Her recent work looks to test, reveal and challenge harmful social and political constructs and is centred on emancipatory concerns. ‘In my current work I draw from archives and collections so this residency is very in line with methods that I use in my practice, but I also have family history relating to the Holocaust. I have worked a lot on trans-generational trauma and other difficult subjects,’ she explains.
Haya-Baviera describes a radical shift in her practice in 2009 when she decided to tackle political issues and make work that was more issue-driven. Key world events including Brexit, the Syrian refugee crisis and a rise in far-right activity informed her new direction of work. In the sense of ‘knowledge is power’, she aims to create work that informs. ‘By exposing different narratives it gives agency to people,’ she suggests. Haya-Baviera also talks about the importance for her of retaining ambiguity within her work whilst giving a platform to seldom heard voices, signalling a compassionate approach to the revealed narratives. Working with the archives, Haya-Baviera was drawn to letters in the Rachel Mendes collection from Mendes’ parents pleading her to leave Germany and find refuge. Haya-Baviera identified a powerful parallel with what is happening in the world right now. She also wants to draw on her personal history as well as the archives and contemporary circumstances.
Irina Razumovskaya is a Russian-Israeli London-based artist working in text and sculpture to explore experiences, perception and memory, questioning how we frame our experiences. She is a ceramic sculptor and educator working with themes of identity, belonging, home and the role of women. She tries not to work too literally or to be too prescriptive, whilst also thinking of the viewer and how they might respond.
Razumovskaya describes how the war in Ukraine shifted her previously compartmentalised view of ‘us and them’ and of how history repeats itself. She also voices concerns about histories being rewritten or erased completely, and has seen the reality of monuments being destroyed as well as the role of artificial intelligence and deep fake Russian propaganda. This concern is also directed towards the potential shifting of the narrative of the Holocaust as first-hand witnesses and survivors die. Razumovskaya stresses the importance of the tangible material of the archive that cannot be changed. ‘Working with archives in this moment is very crucial.’
She also says of working with the archives that ‘The most powerful things for me were little instances of kindness. Things that bring it from a very formal narrative to an actual reality.’ She describes finding letters ‘like a novel of letters, like a play’ from a teacher of a boy in Bradford who got hit by a bus and died. They track attempts to find the relatives and the boy’s Jewish name for the burial, and this captured Razumovskaya’s attention. Razumovskaya also mentions a poem in the archives, ‘What Have I Learned’, which she paraphrases as describing firstly how cruelty has no bounds and secondly the need to remember. The question she asks now after reading these archives is where do we fit in this narrative with our own personal socio-cultural narratives?
Ariane Schick is a French-British London-based artist exploring experiences, perception and memory through image, sculpture, text and sound to question how we frame our experiences and what structures or tools we use to do so. She describes being drawn to the residency as she was already in the headspace of looking at archives, having taken time to look into her own family history since having a baby in 2019. ‘What an amazing opportunity to look at other archives without muddying the waters with my own personal relationship to them!’ she enthuses.
Schick feels the residency process has been intentionally slow due to the traumatic nature of the archives and this has allowed the artists to go in their own directions. She felt the nine-month duration was really attractive and that it has been well paced to allow things to develop. She talks about narratives in the archives having to be unravelled as well as constructing stories from the archives: ‘Stories are things that don’t just fall from the sky but are things [that result] from construction.’
Schick talks about themes of crushing time, compression, multidirectional memory and the peripheries of stories. She also wants to look at the Holocaust from an alternative perspective to the dominant narratives. ‘The Holocaust was so out of the ordinary that dealing with it in a framework that is very ordinary is maybe a technique to access it.’
Schick also voices a feeling of responsibility towards honouring the stories found in the archives. ‘Making work in the context of the many wars that there are, several that stand out in particular, and the idea of talking about trauma that has [occurred] in the past and the traumas of today, you feel the full weight of responsibility of wanting to honour the stories […] You want to speak honestly but serenely. It’s not about spreading panic. It’s about accessing that moment of clarity.’
Schick wants her work to have an immediacy and a purity. ‘I want it to be as simple as the moment you see it,’ she remarks. She intends for her work to be serene enough to speak for itself and poignant enough to honour the archive.
Matt Smith works with museum collections as an artist and curator, employing institutional critique and artistic intervention, re-appropriation and reinterpretation to challenge hegemonic narratives. He is approaching this residency through the lens of queer identities and the Holocaust and is interested in opening up dialogues around this. He talks about the issue of a lack of disabled and LGBTQ+ narratives in Holocaust archives, and the resulting feelings of responsibility. Smith says working with Holocaust archives was never going to be pleasant, but he thought it important and thus felt compelled to undertake this work.
He speaks enthusiastically about working with the archives. ‘It’s been great to be given the opportunity and momentum to approach something that I wouldn’t normally tackle head on.’ In his investigations into why there is an absence of disabled and LGBTQ+ narratives, he notes that they were less likely to have children and therefore have relatives to carry forward archival material and oral histories. Apart from pockets of liberal Berlin, homosexuality was largely criminalised, so there is little documentation of LGBTQ+ lives pre-war. He also talks about his initial surprise and disappointment in finding that concentration camp prisoner records had mostly been destroyed as the war came to an end.
Smith works across ceramic, textile and photography, and talks about his interest in images. He also likes to interrogate who has the authority to document history in making and presenting those images. Smith’s gentle questioning of who is omitted in history and the relevance in contemporary narratives is a poignant and salient subject with rich scope for exploration.
Dr. Alessandro Bucci sums up one of the main drivers for Memorial Gestures: ‘We are very lucky to have what we have as there are a lot of things that we can’t have, that we will never have; things that have been lost, stolen, destroyed, misplaced, forgotten. So artists’ responses can help with that.’ As well as the four artists in residence, a writer and translator are to be added to this year’s residency cohort. The writer will be invited to explore creative responses to the archives in any form, such as in prose, poetry or drama. The translator will be invited to approach translation as a cultural practice rather than to translate everything in the archive into a single language. The languages could be clearly related to the Holocaust or community languages in the North of England.
Curator Paula Kolar speaks enthusiastically about the residencies opening up dialogues as a collective learning process: ‘It’s been very exciting to see Memorial Gestures grow, thanks in part to support from Arts Council England, to include a writer and translator in residence as we work to establish Memorial Gestures as a platform for contemporary reflection on Holocaust memory. This means opening up spaces for dialogue not just between our resident artists, writers, translators and the Holocaust Centre North staff team, but to also include the public and communities in the North in our collective learning process.’ There will be online artist talks coming up in the Spring and workshops held by the artists in Manchester and London later in the year.
Andrew Key hopes that these residencies will open up a dialogue between the archives of the Holocaust and contemporary experiences in a safe, nuanced way that moves away from the divisive rhetoric of mainstream media. As Key says, ‘In terms of engagement of new audiences, we want people to come who are interested in art, ceramics, writing and literature, but we also want people to come who are curious. We want to engage people who wouldn’t necessarily think of the relevance of a Holocaust museum. We want people who can bring their own perspectives and experiences, traumas and ghosts, who might not have a connection with the Holocaust.’ This invitation to artists, writers and translators to respond creatively is therefore extended to the wider community, who may respond with their own perspectives and interpretations of Memorial Gestures.
Memorial Gestures is an annual programme run over a nine-month period by and at Holocaust Centre North inviting artists to respond to their archives and collections, which they feel have contemporary relevance.
Alice Bradshaw is an artist, curator and writer interested in discarded, everyday materials and words.
This review is supported by Holocaust Centre North.
Published 02.04.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
1,975 words