7 Questions for Dr. Natalia Romik

Emma Breitman: How did you first come to work with crystal as a medium?

Natalia Romik: Glass has always fascinated me—as a medium of artistic work, of craft, tradition, and design. It is ephemeral, fragile, elusive. It both reveals and conceals; it is present, but never entirely graspable. This quality is very important to me. For years, I have worked with spatial forms of mirrors and nomadic vehicles, while also researching archives, the histories of shtetls, and the material traces of Jewish life.

My first major project using glass was developed within Nizio Design in Warsaw, where, as part of the architectural studio, I was responsible for reconstructing the bimah in a ruined eighteenth-century synagogue. I approached it differently: not simply as a reconstruction of an architectural element, but as a reconstruction of architectural memory. Although I found a pre-war photograph of the bimah, I decided to rebuild it as a fully open structure, on a 1:1 scale, made entirely of glass. It became an object of architectural hauntology: fully there, and yet also elsewhere; visible, but marked by absence; a structure through which memory could appear without pretending to be complete. 

Only in the last four years have I begun to experiment with vintage glass from the 1960s and 1970s, treating these found objects as ready-made forms, but also as vessels already charged with memory, use, ornament, and domestic histories. 

EB: Much of your work explores Jewish memory and Holocaust commemoration. Can you share how that theme is threaded through this new body of work?

NR: Above all, my work is concerned with memory. I research the histories of small towns in Poland—former shtetls where, before the WWII, Jewish communities often made up a significant part, and sometimes the majority, of the population. I most often turn to the material histories of buildings: mikvahs, synagogues, houses, and pre-burial houses. These structures carry traces of former life, but also of rupture, disappearance, and the many layers of postwar transformation.

I often work together with extraordinary people and organisations, such as Senna Kolwktyw, the Brama Cukermana Foundation, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Center for Urban History in Lviv, the Museum in the former shtetl of Płońsk, and Brama Grodzka in Lublin. These collaborations are very important to me, because memory is never only an individual practice. It is something held, negotiated, protected, and sometimes painfully reconstructed with others.

My current project relates to this history more metaphorically, as a broader ground for thinking about contemporary catastrophes, shared anxieties, and collective fears, but also about common efforts to contain the plagues of our time. 

EB: Community members have the opportunity to contribute leaded glass to the current exhibition. What inspired you to invite this collaboration into your process?

NR: I will answer through three different processes, because each collaboration shaped the project in its own way. One series of sculptures was created at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; another emerged during the archaeological research at the House of Ghetto Fighters in Będzin, in collaboration with the Brama Cukermana Foundation; and the newest edition was created in Toronto, in dialogue with Koffler Arts and its community.

The five months I spent in West Berlin in the spring and summer of 2025 became an extraordinary convergence of my research horizon and the finely woven web of intellectual coexistence among the scholars of the Wissenschaftskolleg, which gradually turned into friendship. It was an intense and inspiring intellectual atmosphere, one that constantly expanded the scope of my reflections. Many of these encounters revolved around the theme of the contemporary “plagues of the world:” the fears, anxieties, and forms of violence that mark our shared present.

We went together to flea markets in Berlin. I selected glass vessels—old, sometimes ornate, sometimes almost forgotten objects—and later the scholars entrusted me with their own extraordinary contributions, small objects that for them embodied particular contemporary plagues. I placed these objects inside the crystal towers, where they were sealed “for eternity” through the use of a special adhesive and UV light. In this way, the sculptures became not only my own works but also repositories of shared thought, conversation, and concern.

In Będzin, the situation had a different, very particular intensity. The workshop took place at a site where young members of the Jewish underground, led by Frumka Płotnicka and inspired by the visit of Mordechai Anielewicz, resisted the Nazis during the brutal liquidation action in August 1943. Together with local participants, and under the careful guidance of an archaeologist, we placed significant and unusual objects inside the glass structures. These objects came from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. They carried with them traces of war, postwar life, abandonment, survival, and transformation.

In 2026, I was commissioned by Koffler Arts in Toronto to create a new edition of Plague Crystals for my exhibition at the gallery. Developed in dialogue with the local context, this edition brought together objects proposed by Koffler Arts staff, as well as friends and supporters of both the institution and my work. Each object was selected to represent a contemporary plague, reflecting the personal concerns, experiences, and perspectives of the individuals who put them forward.

EB: In addition to being an artist, you are also a public historian and architect. How do these three identities intermingle in your work?

NR: I cannot imagine my artistic practice without archival and scholarly research. This was the case with my project Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, and also with Nomadic Shtetl Archive, which became one of the central subjects of my doctoral dissertation at the Bartlett School of Architecture. 

As an architect, I support interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and Jewish heritage, but this kind of work can never be done alone. It requires coalitions, allies, collectives, institutions, and movements, so that tragic histories are not forgotten, erased, or left without care. 

Architecture gives me a way to think through space, structure, material, and absence. Public history gives me a responsibility toward memory, testimony, and communities. Art allows me to create forms through which difficult histories can be felt, encountered, and carried into the present.

These three identities—artist, public historian, and architect—do not function separately in my work. They constantly overlap and challenge one another. I move between the archive, the site, the object, the ruin, the testimony, and the public space. I try to create works that are grounded in research, but that also open up spaces for emotion, imagination, mourning, and care. 

EB: Are there any Jewish histories or rituals that have been particularly fueling for your artistic practice?

NR: I love the great Jewish holidays. They are a time of family, but also of gathering with friends. Pesach is especially important to me, as both a ritual and a time of reflection. Six years ago, during a seder at the Reform Jewish Community Ec Chaim, at a time when Poland was governed by the right-wing Law and Justice party, we began to speak about contemporary plagues. During Pesach, we referred not only to the biblical plagues, but also to the plagues of our own time: hatred directed at the LGBT community, the violation of the constitution, and campaigns against women who had abortions. Each drop of wine on our plates was replaced by one of these contemporary plagues. This experience became a very important inspiration for me in creating the project Plague Crystals.

EB: Your postdoctoral research was an architectural analysis of the secret infrastructure of Jewish survival during the Second World War. Could you share a bit about the inspiration behind the project and its findings?

NR: Inspiration for this project grew out of my research on shtetls, and from the coalitions I have built over many years with activists, researchers, and local organisations in small towns. In Central and Eastern Europe, the situation surrounding the memory of former Jewish communities is becoming increasingly tense. This memory is fragile; it is exposed to erosion, neglect, political instrumentalisation, and sometimes open hostility. I felt that it was necessary to look again at the material traces of Jewish survival—not only as historical evidence, but also as forms of knowledge, imagination, and resistance.

One of my greatest challenges, and also one of my deepest pleasures, is curating exhibitions and making complex histories accessible to wider audiences. This was the case with Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, shown at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, CCA TRAFO in Szczecin, and the Jewish Museum Frankfurt between 2022 and 2024. This interdisciplinary exhibition presented the histories of nine hideouts in Poland and Ukraine, built and used by Jews escaping persecution and trying to survive the Holocaust. People hid in tree hollows, wardrobes, urban sewers, caves, attics, cellars, and even empty graves.

In the exhibition, we showed 1:1 casts of these hideouts, silver-plated with the highest quality silver. These sculptures were conceived as tributes to their builders: to their ingenuity, courage, creativity, and extraordinary will to survive. I wanted to treat these improvised spaces not as marginal or accidental shelters, but as a form of architecture—an architecture created under extreme conditions, often without tools, without safety, and without any certainty of survival. 

EB: Are there any Jewish histories or topics you would like to explore in the future? 

NR: At the moment, I would like to follow my research on hideouts. I am preparing—research-wise, artistically, and archivally—to study hiding places used in contemporary wars and situations of extreme violence: places where Ukrainians have hidden during the Russian invasion, where Palestinian civilians have sought shelter, and where Israelis hid during the massacre of October 7. This is a great challenge, intellectually, ethically, and emotionally. It means thinking about hiding not only as a historical phenomenon, but as a recurring architecture of civilian survival.

I am also preparing for my solo exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which will address the question of post-Jewish property in small towns in Poland: its erosion, abandonment, transformation, and forgetting. Once again, glass will be an important medium, together with casts taken from fragments of buildings: synagogue columns, mikvah interiors, and details of wooden architecture. These fragile forms will speak about what remains, what disappears, and what continues to demand our attention.

Plague Crystals is on view at Koffler Arts until September 6, 2026.