About
Performing Violin Artist.
As an artist, performer, and professional violinist—I explore the spaces where music meets movement, where the boundaries between hearing and seeing dissolve.
The Physicality of The Sound
Projects
My work breaks with classical conventions: the violin travels with me—underwater, in motion, in ritual. I use improvisation, choreography, and visual language to transform performance into a multi-sensory experience. Each piece I create is a living composition: physical, immersive, and experimental. Whether lying, running, floating, or dancing, the instrument follows the body, and the music emerges from its movement. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and my solo productions, I direct and perform works that question perception, expand sonic experience, and redefine what a violin—and performer—can be.
PERCEPTIONS OF (IN) REAL – UNDERWATER
Film
With the project PERCEPTIONS OF (IN) REAL – UNDERWATER, violinist Justyna Niżnik opens up a world to the audience that transcends the boundaries between sound and image, reality and illusion. This interdisciplinary art project explores the relationship between music and visualization under the unique condition of being underwater, thus creating new dimensions of perception.
Supported by the Kunststiftung NRW, unconventional experiments were carried out in August and September 2023 using a specially developed waterproof violin, hydrophones, and underwater cameras. These instruments not only capture the sounds of the violin, the water, and the moving body, but also create a multi-sensory experience that visually and acoustically reveals a completely new world.
The recordings of the violin being played at different depths in lakes and swimming pools create a soundscape that is hyperbolic; the sound, captured by the specially made hydrophones, and the accompanying underwater images merge into a unity that transports the viewer into an ambivalent sphere where the real blurs with the unreal.
PERCEPTIONS OF (IN) REAL – UNDERWATER seeks to go beyond a conventional audiovisual presentation. It is an artistic act, a ritual that challenges our conventional notions of space, time, and perception. Sound is made visible through performative film techniques, while at the same time seeing becomes a musical experience. The project addresses the fluid boundaries between identity, reality, and artistic expression and takes the audience on a journey that will be remembered.
Violin & Performance – Justyna Niżnik
Camera & Photos – Michael Maurissens
Sound Design – Uygur Vural / Harris Astir
Conceptual Collaboration – Mateusz Czyczerski
Cologne, Germany / Büllingen, Belgium
September–October 2023
PERCEPTIONS OF (IN) REAL – UNDERWATER
Multimedia Installation with Live Performance in Water Tank
At its center stands a transparent container — 2.1 meters high — that becomes both stage and vessel. Inside, a violin performance unfolds underwater: an act suspended between visibility and opacity, fragility and endurance. Light, sound, and liquid converge, transforming the tank into an axis of reflection, where audiences circle, enveloped by aqueous resonance and shifting projections.
Around this core, the installation expands across walls, ceilings, and floors. Collected audio-visual materials are reframed as fragments of memory and atmosphere, projected onto glass surfaces, floors, and architectural planes. Headphones carry an underwater score composed specifically for the work, drawing the listener into an acoustic threshold where sound is not only heard but inhabited.
The architecture of the site allows the work to resonate both inward and outward, engaging passersby in the public realm as well as visitors within. Boundaries between interior and exterior, between private contemplation and collective encounter, dissolve into a shared space of immersion.
More than an event, the work persists as an extended installation, a site of continuity where disciplines interweave. It opens a temporal and sensorial field in which sound, architecture, and performance converge, inviting a slow unfolding of perception and a reimagining of the porous boundaries between art forms.
Violin & Performance – Justyna Niżnik
Camera & Video – Michael Maurissens
Sound Design – Karol Nepelski
Conceptual Collaboration – Mateusz Czyczerski
Technical Director – Thorsten Schreiter
Light Design – Matthias Singer
Costume Design – Flora Miranda
Sound & Light Technic – Beppo Fox
Photos – Claudia Moeller
Premiered – Stoffpavillion Möller
Cologne, Germany
25 October 2024
PERCEPTIONS OF (IN) REAL – UNDERWATER
Concert Underwater in a Public Swimming Pool with Audience in the Water
A fully submerged concert in a public swimming pool—an immersive live performance experienced underwater by both the artist and the audience. Situated within the Aspekt_Aquarium installation, this work constituted an exploration of sonic, visual, and spatial poetics in a state of suspension.
Through the diffusion of sound via underwater transducers and the projection of aqueous imagery onto both the surface and floor of the pool, the performance dissolved conventional hierarchies of perception. The body, enveloped by a liquid medium, became simultaneously listener, viewer, and participant—an instrument of embodied cognition.
Structured as a contemporary ritual, the event enacted a choreography of transition: from arrival to stillness, from detachment to sensorial immersion. It drew upon the archetypal symbolism of water rituals—practices that, across cultures, mark the passage from profane to liminal states. Here, water functioned not merely as a setting but as a philosophical agent—a medium through which time dilated and perception deepened. The installation foregrounded slowness, attentiveness, and the suspension of habitual perception. The swimming pool—reframed as a site of transformation—became a space of aesthetic unlearning, in which the audience encountered the sonic not as auditory input alone, but as a felt, diffused resonance.
Violin & Performance – Justyna Niżnik
Video & Photos – Michael Maurissens
Sound Design – Karol Nepelski
Conceptual Collaboration – Mateusz Czyczerski
Technical Director – Thorsten Schreiter
Light Design – Matthias Singer
Costume Design – Flora Miranda
Sound & Light Technic – Beppo Fox
Premiered – Neptunbad
Cologne, Germany
9 November 2024
i.r. R.S.V.P.
Justyna Niżnik, Ophelia Young with Senga Nengudi
Senga Nengudi’s“Répondez s’il vous plaît” series R.S.V.P., created in the 1970s, explores the resilience and vulnerability of the human body, particularly the female body, through nylon forms stretched, knotted, and filled with sand. Originally activated in performances by Maren Hassinger, these works embody the tension between fragility and strength, intimacy and resistance.
Today, violinist and movement artist Justyna Niżnik and dancer Ophelia Young bring a new activation of R.S.V.P. into dialogue with contemporary audiences. Their performance combines sound, movement, and sculpture to highlight the timeless dualities of Nengudi’s work while situating them within present-day conversations about womanhood, identity, and resilience across cultures.
Sculpture & Direction – Senga Nengudi
Activation Performance & Violin – Justyna Niżnik
Activation Performance & Dance – Ophelia Young
Original Performance Collaborators – Julie Stanczak / Naomi Brito / Ophelia Young
Video & Images – Bastian Hessler / Alexander Lopez
Premiered – Von der Heydt Museum
Wuppertal, Germany
21 August 2022
THE PHYSICALITY OF THE SOUND
the body as the intersection of sound and image
Multimedia installation with Live Performance
THE PHYSICALITY OF THE SOUND is a solo performance that investigates the body as a dynamic site where sound and image converge. Justyna Niżnik, a classically trained violinist who shifted from orchestral work in 2008 towards contemporary musical expression, has spent several years collaborating improvisationally with dancers from companies such as Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal and Richard Siegal’s Ballet of Difference. These interdisciplinary experiences inform the project’s central inquiry: flattening the hierarchy between movements designed to produce music and those intended to create dance images.
In addition to giving equal value to the performer’s body as the location of image and sound, THE PHYSICALITY OF THE SOUND uses pre-recorded video to show visually and sonically the performer’s body as memory: a material form sculpted by the repetition of gestures designed to produce sound (music) and images (dance). The video used in the performance shows the musculature of the back of the performing violinist in motion, revealing the plasticity of the body and its ability to adapt to what is demanded of it.
Moreover, the presence of this video is treated as a performer in and of itself, a subject to be related to live on stage, equipped with a violin and live electronic processing of the acoustic music. To heighten the listener’s perception of sound as movement, THE PHYSICALITY OF THE SOUND is transported to the spectator by a surround system of four speakers, enabling radical specialization of the music. The pace of movement, the frequency of sound, the splitting of atoms, and the sloughing of skin cells in space are inspirations for the musical material and imagery.
Violin & Performance – Justyna Niżnik
Video – Gustavo Gomez / Mateusz Czyczerski
Conceptual Collaboration – Gustavo Gomez / Mateusz Czyczerski
Photos – Mateusz Czyczerski
Premiered – RELAY Symposium, ZZT Cologne
Cologne, Germany
30 April 2023
TRADITIONELLE UNKONVENTIONELLE
Parcour Concert Performance
TRADITIONELLE UNKONVENTIONELLE is an immersive solo concert performance that fuses the structural clarity of a music concert with the transformative power of theatrical conventions. In this 60-minute journey through the striking architecture of the space, the audience is guided through a choreographed parkour in which music is not only heard but embodied — where light, movement, costume, and space shape the rhythm and direction of the experience.
Each moment unfolds organically, as classical motifs and fragments serve as seeds for entirely new sonic worlds, brought to life through improvisation and performative exploration.
TRADITIONELLE UNKONVENTIONELLE challenges traditional hierarchies and redefines perception, offering a living, breathing dialogue between tradition and innovation—between the traditionelle and the unkonventionelle.
Violin & Performance – Justyna Niżnik
E-Guitar & Electronics – Hubert Machnik
Video & Photos – Mateusz Czyczerski
Conceptual collaboration – Mateusz Czyczerski / Gustavo Gomez
Premiered – Lichtturm Solingen
Solingen, Germany
8 October 2022
Biography
With an ever-evolving practice that bridges historical performance and contemporary experimentation, Justyna Niznik continues to push the boundaries of musical expression, redefining the possibilities of the violin and sound in space in the process.
Born in 1981 in Krosno, Poland, she began her musical training at the age of seven, quickly distinguishing herself through numerous competition prizes and awards, including a prestigious scholarship from the Polish Prime Minister.
Justyna Niżnik holds three university degrees and studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Weimar and the Academy of Music and Dance in Cologne. In October 2025, she begins her studies in Performance at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
She received lessons from Prof. Bartosz Bryla (PL), Prof. Friedemann Eichhorn (DE), Prof. Ulrich Beetz (DE), and Prof. Richard Gwilt (GB). She has taken part in master classes with Prof. Midori Seiler, Stefan Mai, Prof. Anton Steck, Enrico Onofri, Elizabeth Wallfisch, and Jaap ter Linden, among others.
Her commitment to baroque music was reinforced by her extensive European tours with the European Union Baroque Orchestra (EUBO) in 2011. From 2010 to 2016, she was a soloist with the Cologne Baroque Orchestra and held the position of concertmaster until 2018. Since 2008, she has increasingly devoted herself to interdisciplinary projects at the interface of music, movement, and physical performance. Her first cross-genre collaborations include projects with the Zurich label SpezialMaterial and the Ensemble Mertin-Niznik.
Her recent works reflect a deep engagement with experimental sound and embodied performance, including New Ocean Sea Cycle at Kolumba with Richard Siegal’s Ballet of Difference at Schauspiel Köln (August 2021), Under Construction Festival with TanztheaterWuppertal Pina Bausch (May 2022), TRADITIONELLE UNKONVENTIONELLE (October 2022), and performance R.S.V.P. of Senga Nengudi with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch at the Von der Heydt Museum (August 2022–February 2023).
In early 2023, Justyna Niznik was a Kunststiftung NRW’s Artist-in-Residence in Istanbul (February–April), engaging with the local arts community through her research on sound and space. Later that year, she presented THE PHYSICALITY OF THE SOUND at the RELAY Symposium, ZZT Cologne (April 2023), an exploration of the embodied experience of sound. In September 2023, she initiated her research for the project PERCEPTIONS OF (IN) REAL – UNDERWATER.