Holocaust Centre North Artists Call Out For Memorial Gestures 2026

Holocaust Centre North is now seeking participants for its annual and innovative creative residency programme, Memorial Gestures. First launched in 2022, this unique artistic programme aims to give leading and emerging artists the opportunity to create brand new artwork in response to themes around Holocaust remembrance and history. It is a remote and paid for creative residency programme created specifically by the Centre, to enable artists to conduct creative research into its own archives and collections.

The 26/27 Memorial Gestures Artistic Residency programme will run from May to December – culminating in a major exhibition of work at Sunny Bank Mills in Yorkshire in Spring 2027. Holocaust Centre North is seeking a total of five new artists for its 2026 cohort, with each residency lasting eight months. Each artist will be funded £6,000, plus materials and travel expenses for the duration of the residency. The remit for each new artistic appointment has been expanded to include exciting new partnerships and residency formats.

Holocaust Centre North – based at the University of Huddersfield – not only tells the global story of the Holocaust but does so through over 120 local stories and materials from survivors who subsequently created new lives in the North of England.

For Memorial Gestures 2026, Holocaust Centre North is now seeking:

·        2 artists-in-residence to explore its archives and respond creatively to the themes they feel have contemporary relevance in collaboration with new partner Invisible Flock. These two residences will include a micro residency with Invisible Flock who are based locally at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Invisible Flock is an interactive arts studio who create innovative, participatory artwork that explores the intersection of art and technology, often focusing on environmental themes and the impact of technology on society.

·        1 artist-in-residence at Holocaust Centre North & working in partnership with the Centre of Archaeology to explore Holocaust Centre North Archive and respond to investigations carried out by the Centre of Archaeology in Trawniki, Poland at the site of former Nazi camps. This residency invites artists and practitioners to explore how archaeology, forensic investigation, and historical research can inform creative practice, and how art can open space for thoughtful, sensitive conversations about past and present injustices.

• 1 community-artist-in-residence at Holocaust Centre North & in partnership with 6 Million +. The aim of this residency post is to explore the archives of Holocaust Centre North and to work with 6 Million+ to co-create a piece of work for Holocaust Memorial Day 2027 with a community of people with lived experience of migration. Yorkshire based community group 6 Million+ is a significant initiative that aims to raise awareness of the Holocaust and its impact on persecuted minorities. The charity has 23 years of experience leading creative arts projects with an extended family of refugees and local communities. The chosen artist will have time to explore the stories in Holocaust Centre North Archive and 6 Million + Community and then work with community groups to reflect on the contemporary relevance of stories of migration, ethnic persecution and surviving genocide
• 1 cultural-translator-in-residence at Holocaust Centre North to help make the stories from its archive accessible to new audiences in Kirklees. The cultural-translator-in-residence will be asked to design a series of workshops for community groups where materials will be translated into community languages collaboratively. The cultural-translator-in-residence will not be expected to be a speaker of community languages themselves, as they will receive help from external translators for workshop facilitation. But they will be tasked to choose material from Holocaust Centre North’s archives and decide what material is suitable and might have relevance to audiences today. They will edit a publication of translations at the end and be asked to reflect on their process whether that be in writing or visually. Holocaust Centre North is looking for a writer, editor or curator interested in memory, migration and social practice to fill this post and particularly welcomes applications from people with lived experience of migration or conflict. Cultural translation is understood as the process of negotiation meaning across language, communities, generations and time.

All of the newly appointed artists will be part of a group learning programme and given the opportunity to spend time in Holocaust Centre North’s archive, work with its curators and archivists, exploring its growing collection of documentary evidence of the Holocaust and the lives of survivors who rebuilt their lives in the North of England.

In June 2025, all 14 of the participating artists in the first three years of Memorial Gestures shared their final and brand-new work in response to the extensive archival collections and objects all bequeathed to the Centre by survivors and their families who made new lives in the North of England after the Holocaust. This was the first exhibition of its kind in the UK whereby artists have created new work in direct response to Holocaust archival materials. The result was a remarkable, unique and intimate body of work – incorporating works in textile, video, installation, photography, drawing, etching, ceramics, print, translation, found objects, and text.

On last year’s Exhibition, Mag North commented: “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.”

On the Memorial Gestures residency programme, Holocaust Centre North’s Director Alessandro Bucci comments: “Several questions shape the Memorial Gestures Programme. How do we foster a responsible culture of care towards stories of persecution and forced migration loss and their afterlives? Artworks created during Memorial Gestures have shown us the limitations of language when speaking about trauma. We therefore turned to artists and their languages and their codes of expression. As one visitor to the Exhibition remarked: “Thank god for artists for giving us a different language to talk about the unimaginable.”

The deadline to apply for the 2026 Memorial Gestures artistic residency programme is 10am on April 7^th.

Holocaust Centre North is hosting an online information session for prospective applicants on March 24^th at 12.30pm and on March 25 at 5.30pm.

To find out more about these online sessions, the application process and more about the artistic residency programme itself – please log on the Holocaust Centre North’s designated Memorial Gestures page on its website: Memorial Gestures 4 - Open Call · Holocaust Centre North OR email the centre directly via memorial.gestures@hud.ac.uk