JW
Julia Waraksa is based in Antwerp.
JW
Previous Work
Next Work

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.
Download CV, Portfolio.

Selected Exhibitions

2026 Six Ways for Holding, 12Antwerp, Antwerp, BE (Group Show)
2025 The Road Towards Cul de Sac, In Situ Department, Antwerp, BE (Group Show)
2025 Unsituated, Ercola, Antwerp, BE (Group Show)
2025 Blueprints, Het Bos, Antwerp, BE (Group Show)
2024 My Past is Not A Myth, Iusty Art Gallery, Chișinău, MD (Group Show)
2022 Graduation Show, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, NL (Group Show)
2019 Quarter Past Ten, Gallery Joey Ramone, Rotterdam, NL(Group Show)

 

Grants and Residencies

2026–27 International Scholarship, Cultuurfonds, NL
2025 In Situ Residency, Ercola, Antwerp, BE
2025 Xibalba In Situ Residency, In Situ Department, Tiercé, FR
2024–25 HUP Artist Starter Grant, Kunstwerkt, BE
2024–25 Blueprints Photography Residency, Breedbeeld, BE

 

Education

2027 MA In Situ (Fine Arts), The Royal Academy of Art, Antwerp, BE
2022 BA Graphic Design (Visual Arts), The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, NL



Teaching and Mentorship

2025 Guest Lecturer, Photography and Film Department, St. Joost, Breda, NL
2024 Spacemakers, Galerie Pouleuff, Residency Mentorship w/ Tudor Bratu, Naarden-Vesting, NL
2024 Guest Lecturer, Fine Arts Department, AKI, Enschede, NL

 

Artist Statement (January 2026)

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?

Shaped by a personal history of displacement, migrant labour, and inherited trauma, my practice unfolds as an ongoing investigation into the conditions of memory and belonging. If our present is shaped by wars of information, where truth is unstable and continuously rewritten, then remembrance becomes both a fragile and radical act. I seek to work against fixed narratives, bringing the near and the distant into the same space, allowing them to interfere, overlap, and remain unresolved.

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.

Exhumations (Series), 2026 –

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.