Born on 22 February 1909 in Suczawa on the eastern frontier of the Habsburg Empire (now Suceava in Romania), the artist Arnold Daghani is best known for works relating to the Nazi slave labour camps in the Ukraine. One of his earliest paintings, featured in this programme, shows his wife waiting full of apprehension at the window of their home in Czernowitz in 1942. Worse was to follow when they were deported to the slave labour camp at Mikhailowka. Like other Jewish prisoners, the artist and his wife went in constant fear of starvation and death. But Daghani succeeded in making a secret record of their sufferings by means of striking watercolours and a cryptic diary, which includes a graphic account of their daring escape.

Curated by Dr Deborah Schultz, the exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum London marks the centenary of the artist’s birth and presents drawings and watercolours that were smuggled out of the Mikhailowka slave labour camp and Bershad ghetto (1942–3). They are displayed together with later mixed media works that combine words and images. Daghani’s practice addresses issues of justice and memory, and the problems of Holocaust representation. The exhibition is drawn from the wealth of artworks and documentation in the Arnold Daghani Collection, presented to the University of Sussex after the artist’s death in 1985.