Imprints on Water
Installation with water, archival film stills and poetry, 2025
Imprints on Water is an installation combining archival film stills, water and poetry. It was developed as part of Life Lines, a multimedia project responding to the story of Holocaust survivor Naomi Warren and the circumstances through which her family in the United States learned that she had survived the war.
About the Work
The installation consists of two transparent water tanks positioned in a darkened space and lit from above. Archival stills from silent footage held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum show displaced persons and Holocaust survivors arriving in New York via Ellis Island in 1946. Photographic prints made from the stills float on the surface of one tank, gradually absorbing water and changing over the course of the exhibition.
In the second tank, A New Genealogy, a poem by Polish-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Irit Amiel (1931–2021), is positioned beneath the water. Presented in the original Polish alongside an English translation, the text is legible when the surface is still, but becomes fragmented and obscured as the water moves. The poem traces the generations that followed Amiel’s survival of the Holocaust, naming her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren before culminating in her description of herself as “born twice”: first in 1931 and again in 1942.
Water functions in the installation as both carrier and agent of transformation. It holds image and language in view while continually altering their visibility. Through this unstable surface, the work considers how memory is preserved, transmitted and transformed through images, language, bodies and generations, and what becomes obscured and what remains visible in that process..
Details
Archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle paper, 10 × 15 cm
Two glass water tanks, 50 × 30 cm
Poem printed in Polish and English
Credits
Archival film stills courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Archives and Records Administration.
Poem A New Genealogy by Irit Amiel, used with permission of the Amiel estate.
English translation by Mark Kazmierski, courtesy of the translator.
Exhibitions
Life Lines, Wozownia Art Gallery, Toruń, Poland, October 2025, as part of Vintage Photo Festival.
Installation views: Wozownia Art Gallery, Toruń, Poland. Photography by the artist and Mateusz Jagielski/Wozownia Gallery.
Part of Life Lines, developed in collaboration with the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock.
Project PDF
Other Works in Life Lines
Photography Credits
Installation photography: Mateusz Jagielski / Wozownia Art Gallery, Poland, 2025
Additional installation photography: Ania Ready
Archival film stills: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
