Julia Willms

E-mailadresjw@willmsworks.net

Websitewillmsworks.net

Biografie Julia Willms (DE/NL) studied Visual Communications at the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht (NL) and Media Art at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna (AT). Her work deals with the nature of perception, the very act of viewing itself and the shifting position of the spectator within the proposed environment. It takes form of video installations (often site responsive) for the borderlines of spaces and architectural environments, performances, photo collages as well as installations and drawings.

With Andrea Božić, Julia has been developing Spectra - Space Is an Organism, a long-term artistic research into attention and space and how their re-organisation affects one's sense of reality and the modes of spectatorship emerging from it.

In the coming years, Andrea and Julia are developing a performative-cinematic multiverse under the title LUNARIS, a fictional shared world embedded in the real world which will host a constellation of artistic works as a transmedia labyrinth: several performances and audio-visual performative installations and related smaller works. For LUNARIS, they collaborate with the Premonitions Agency, a specu-fictional government funded agency whose task is to collect, analyse and interpret citizens’ dreams, and to intervene into those dreams in an attempt to affect real-life events. With LUNARIS, they explore how spectatorship, imagination and spectacle are intertwined, embodied and felt amidst the next wave of digitalization and globalization, and the questions of free will, agency and sentience within it.

Her works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions (Centre Pompidou Metz/Metz, GAM | Obrist Gallery/Essen, Reina Sofia/Madrid, De Appel/Amsterdam, BNKR/Munich, Museum Sinclair Haus/Bad Homburg, a.o.), as well as in media & video art and performance festivals and theatres internationally (Frascati/Amsterdam, SPRING/ Utrecht, EMAF/Osnabrück, Almost Cinema/International Filmfestival Ghent, Netaudio London a.o.).

Julia is together with Andrea Božić artistic director of TILT since 2012, an Amsterdam-based in-disciplinary platform with a focus on artistic research and creation, realisation and dissemination of their performance and visual arts works as well as that of TILT associate artist performance and theatre maker Billy Mullaney. TILT also focuses on the development of discourse, workshops, educational and curatorial activities departing from artistic practice and theory. TILT is based at the Spectra | Studio in Marci Panis, Amsterdam and receives structural subsidy from the Amsterdam Fund for the Art for the period 2025-2028.

Julia is one of the co-founders of BAU - space for performing arts Amsterdam. She has taught at ArtScience at the Royal Academy of the Arts of The Hague, was mentor at the Amsterdam Master of Film and the HKU Master of Scenography in Utrecht and has given workshops internationally (DAS Theatre/AHK, Royal Academy of Art The Hague, ICK, Interrarium – The Banff Arts Centre, a.o.).