Julia Waraksa (b. 1998, Poland) grew up in the Netherlands, navigating displacement between East and West, past and present. She investigates the tension between personal experience and collective narrative. Her practice engages with archives, histories of labour, and the residues of human action, transforming objects once destined for discard into spatial and poetic experiences that challenge the viewer’s perception of time, trauma, and memory.
For any inquiries please e-mail info@juliawaraksa.com.
Artist Statement
The tragedies of the twentieth century revealed that the scale of ruination runs parallel to the scale of our collective conscience. Memorials rise, archives expand, and rituals of remembrance repeat — marking not only what we choose to remember, but how we attempt to live with it. In a present marked by forgetfulness, the urgency lies in moving beyond a state of perpetuated muteness. Truth conceals itself not in what is spoken, but in the absence thereof. What can mankind see without sight?
By using raw and reclaimed materials — often those destined to be discarded, burnt, or erased — I attempt to engage in acts of salvation and transformation. Fire, suspension, and fragmentation function both as formal strategies and as conceptual tools: not only referencing destruction, but also protection, instability, and potential. Within these frameworks, I treat language not as a social structure, but as matter: something that compresses, fractures, obscures, and carries residue. Through these gestures, I attempt to reframe sites of erasure as sites of possibility.
What emerges is not a fixed narrative, but a field of relations—between past and present, personal and collective, destruction and protection. A practice that does not resolve, but insists on engaging with what remains. This pursuit is closely accompanied by the writings of Simone Weil, Paul Celan and Czeslaw Milosz, who sought to define universal truths, particularly in the realms of morality, justice and spirituality.
January 2026
Artistic Practice
Exhumations, 2026
The series Exhumations marks the beginning of my sculptural practice. Drawing on my own bodily experiences —birth, childhood, mortality, and the spaces in between— I work with raw and reclaimed materials such as wood, fire, ash, coal and chalk to excavate both past and present conditions. Here, the body and its surroundings unfold as a topography of scars. Rather than framing it as a site of ailment, I reveal a poetic resilience within fragile conditions of endurance.
Record Shredder, 2025
An in-situ response to the group show On the Road Towards Cul-De-Sac at the In Situ studio. The curatorial prompt addresses the pre-existing systems of the space — new and old heating components, vents, the old petroleum tank, and the materiality of the room — entering the infrastructure to become part of it. Record Shredder generates heat (by overheating) through the act of allowing the viewer to shred a list of Belgian petroleum companies.
Nacht (Cycle), 2026 –
Since the beginning of 2026, I have been exploring the idea of developing a cycle of ‘negative paintings’. These works embody the duality of their name: through the use of negative space and the deliberate destruction of material, I re-interpret an archival image of violence into a tangible, material experience. The image in the first cycle above, cut from a WW2 history magazine, originates from the Warsaw Ghetto archives (1943–44).
In Flanders Fields lies still, 2025 –
Since 2024, I have frequently been visiting the former WWI frontline in West Flanders. Trees appear shallowly rooted, their young branches twisting into their core, as if bleeding. With my camera and notebook, I trace a landscape pierced by mutilated stumps, barbed wire, and a silence signaling imminent, uncertain danger.
This wounded land does not merely bear the illusion of peace — it reflects a traumatic memory that extends beyond the numerous cemeteries and memorials. Through these lingering scars, I trace the Great War’s impact on language, collective memory, and ‘Othering’. My artistic research contends that this war is not of the past, and healing can only begin within the process of unearthing.
Archive, 2022 –
In an attempt to make sense of my century, my photographic eye captures the ecological, human and urban traces of ruin, as their processes of decaying actively inscribe themselves into the geological and social landscape. The archive investigates the appearance and consequence of our current condition and what I label a “hurried pull towards the future” (in reference to the twentieth century revolutions) – a momentum that simultaneously and ostensibly rejects the formation of a past.
The archive follows no clear stream of historicity, but rather presents itself as a study of behavioural repetition across varying socio-political climates that share one thing in common: the pursuit of endless acceleration, at the cost of ecologically balanced cycles of growth and decay. The archive currently spans geographically across Ukraine, Romania, Belgium, Germany, Moldova and Sicily.
Not to bear Witness, but to bear Presence, 2024
icw. Tudor Bratu
"In the desert of history every step forward seems a lurch towards a past that divulges itself as an unbound trace. This trace scatters as it attempts to form a path, while it simultaneously crosses the organ that propels it onwards. The resulting dichotomy becomes indicative of a linearity that is both leading, and disorienting – a dance that elegantly, yet covertly, omits the collision with a collective memory that is often presumed to be final. Remembrance seems hardly possible without this misleading dance, for the act of remembering carries within itself an act of betrayal – both a forgetting, and an absence. There is hardly a history without a submission to this movement, and therefore, hardly a history without an admittance to a perpetuation of betrayal, or to forgetting, or to absence.
The blind admittance to this linearity suggests a missing language – a dialogue that cannot be held until words are formed and spoken, and then, with the greatest hesitation, left unbound. To chisel words into a stone not to form them, but to suggest the movement and the force that makes the cut. To trace a footprint not in order take the same path, but to deepen the imprints left behind. The gaze leads itself to the picture not to bear witness, but to bear presence." (Julia Waraksa, 2024)
A Bear Trap in No Man's Land, 2022
Monuments, documents, and records of collective trauma exist to stand for and contain that which has happened. But in an attempt to lighten the burden of atrocity and barbarism, these mementos simultaneously distance us from the context that birthed them. Through the act of burying and depositing history in monuments and artefacts and by grouping victims into categories and statistics, we are letting a passive silence do the work an active memory should engage. The moment a violence of the past resurfaces, we detach in disbelief and in repetition.
The publication intertwines two archives that bear witness to the violence of the twentieth century: photographic records (witnesses) and literary reflections (the work of mourning). With facts eschewed to an index in the back, the visual and literary representations affect the reader as they echo the histories that contain them. The project proposes a reflection on trauma and the administration of a regime of tragedy that ensued within as well as characterised the twentieth century.
Within the installation the publication is accompanied by a collection of photographs which display sites of former concentration and transit camps across Eastern Europe. Eighty years later, as testament to the negligence towards our collective memories, these forlorn sites have become fragmented representations of an inexpressible absence. It is through monuments that a language of heroism rewrites senseless death as martyrdom, thereby annulling the necessity of a work of memory.
The Poetry of Protest, 2019
Where protests are part of a systematic, nonviolent campaign to achieve a particular objective, involving the use of pressure and persuasion, they go beyond mere protest as a definition and may better be described as cases of civil resistance – or situations of absolute chaos. The Poetry of Protest takes a look at the character of protest, decomposing its underlying destructive nature through a poem in three verses: the chants, the chaos and the aftermath. Selected spreads.
"Action possesses a second virtue within the sphere of incitations. It not only confers reality upon incitations which previously, existed in a semi-phantasmal state: it also causes incitations and feelings to arise in the mind which previously didn't exist at all. That happens every time either the enthusiasm of the moment or the force of circumstances causes the action to go beyond the total sum of energy contained in the incitation which has produced the action. This mechanism –knowledge of which is essential for the conduct of one's own life as for its action upon men in general– is equally capable of producing evil or good." (1)
1) S. Weil, "The Growing of Roots", The Need for Roots, Editions Gallimard, trans. by Arthur Wills, 1952. p.207.
Teaching
In Loving Memory, 2024
Spacemakers Residency Programme, Galerie Pouloeuff icw. Tudor Bratu
Month long residency in which artists Madeleine Elisabeth Peccoux, Yawen Fu and Pelle Nijburg delved into the National Dutch Archives to develop a completely new work. Together with Tudor Bratu, we guided them to seek alternate methodologies to expand their pre-established artistic practices. The selected entries in the archive were addressed by the artists from positions of individual consciousness, posing critical questions towards the authenticity of (national) memory. The works were exhibited at the Galerie Pouloeuff in Naarden Vesting, from 24 September to 24 October, 2024.
Reality, Fiction & Other Truths, 2024
Course given during the Art Labs Programme at the AKI University of Art and Design
Over a period of 2 months and across 6 intensive workshops days, I took the second and third year students from the AKI Fine Arts department through my course "Reality, Fiction & Other Truths". The programme encompassed a wide variety of activities, reading material and lectures to bridge the students' individual art practices with language and literature, and to inspire within them the discovery of language as a medium. During the course, the students learned to investigate, analyse and re-purpose words and their relation to image and perception, allowing them to question, re-contextualise and reappropriate meaning through their own artistic lens. The course finished with an exhibition day, and the works were archived in an exhibition booklet where the project captions were written by the students as poems.
Commissions and Collaborations
My Sweet Elora, 2024
First self-published book by Belgian photographer Luuk van Raamsdonk.
“My Sweet Elora is a collection of photographs and moving images of both the past and present Elora. Using them to dissect the complicated nature of family dynamics. While also using it as an ongoing formulation of personal identity and self within the context of family history.
Through this journey, I confront the unresolved questions of love, loss. It is a mirror reflecting the cycles we inherit, the secrets we uncover, and the choices we make to shape our future. Elora becomes a symbol—a place where the past collides with the present, where the personal and universal intersect. This body of work is both a reckoning and a reconciliation. “
Project text by Luuk van Raamsdonk.
The Fragile Archives, 2024
Design, guidance and editing for the book by the Dutch photographer Eva van Hees. At the time of working on this project, Eva’s grandmother was already unable to recall many of the faces and names of her life’s archive, and was hence unable to help her through this process. In The Fragile Archives, Eva addresses her grandmother's advanced dementia diagnosis through questions of what it means to live a life without the bulk of one's memory, as well as the purpose of documentation if the context is bound to be lost. Eva takes the attempt to recover the archive by reappropriating her grandmother's memories as her own, leaving only glimpses in reoccurring faces and themes, and clues on the backs of the photographs.
Nelli Serzanowa, 2023
Development of website and artistic identity for the Ukrainian visual artist Nelli Serzanowa.
Sto(ma), 2021
Design and editing of a publication for the Dutch photographer Amy Opstal. Sto(ma) is an intimate photographic documentary and reflection about her mother's dysfunctional body.