Exhibitions
Works
About
CV
Born 2000 in Norrköping, Sweden.
Based in Umeå and Malmö, Sweden.
CONTACT
E-mail julia-aberg@hotmail.se
Instagram @jjulia.aberg
Julia Åberg’s work employs visual storytelling through collage, text and printmaking. Influenced by film, snapshot photography and surrealist paintings, Åberg’s collages combine everyday realism with a dreamlike state of mind. They resemble film stills or cinematic sequences, layered with overlapping narratives.
As source material, she works with old editions of the Swedish magazine “SE” which was an important photojournalism publication that ran from 1938 to 1981. The editions Åberg uses, material mostly from its publication in the late 1950s, reflect a different era, where the articles and photographs were almost exclusively in black and white.
This conscious disconnection from today’s world opens up space for her own reinterpretation. Rather than referencing current culture, Åberg chooses imagery from another time, using it as raw material to craft new narratives. Emotional connections to certain fragments guide her process, while she explores the compositional potential of each image.
Elements are erased — people, objects, traces — and the newspaper medium itself, once a vehicle for current events, is dismantled. “I need to put things in order” an urge that comes after breaking down pictures into small fragments. Sorting them by texture, grayscale, and motif. The act of zooming in and out alters scale and perception. Patterns emerge, visual echoes recur and a new landscape begins to form.
What first appears chaotic is carefully organized: a fragmented world is reimagined from small snippets into a cohesive whole. The constructed chaos gives rise to unfamiliar terrains — forests, structures, abstract scenes made from countless individual parts. These backdrops suggest personal impressions and untold stories. In this emotional reordering, scenes appear frozen in time — yet are charged with internal movement. Like the paper itself, which fades over time — some areas more than others — the stories it once carried also begin to vanish and change.
Text by @juliaharrauer