The "Zjawa / Phantom Monument" exhibition at the "Synagogue" Center in Zamość is the next installment of the Renata Kamińska's project dedicated to Rosa Luxemburg. At the same time, the parts of the project are presented in Zurich (Kunst im öffentlichen Raum) and in Berlin at the Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz. The inaugural exhibition took place in Warsaw at the STUDIO Gallery in PKiN. Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) lived and worked in these four cities.

Opening and performance: June 28, 2019, at 18:00
The exhibition is presented from June 28 to August 31, 2019

Renata Kamińska has been interested in the figure of Luxembourg for several years, studying the historical and contemporary contexts. At the exhibition, we will see an installation of fragments of pavements and the surface of Rosa Luxemburg Square in Berlin, a photo project dedicated to the Luxemburg house at Kościuszki street (former Ogrodowa) in Zamość and sculptural installations. On the day of the vernissage we will read an interview with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg.

Rosa Luxemburg was a social-democratic activist. She was murdered by the German police on the night of 15 to 16 January 1919 in Berlin. Her body was thrown into the canal. The murder came out many months later. Chief of the paramilitary formation Freikorps, Waldemar Pabst was not brought to court. 150,000 people attended her "symbolic" funeral.

In Poland, plaques commemorating Luxembourg are removed today, the house of her birth in Zamość is in a very bad condition and it is waiting for a renovation. Events and people related to the workers movement are disappearing from the social memory. Whereas in Berlin, one of the main squares and the street bear her name. In 2006, the Hans Haacke's "Memorial Rosa Luxemburg" project was created there. But it used to be different. After the Nazis came to power, the activists of the socialist left side were forgotten. Hitler ordered to demolish a monument dedicated to Luxembourg, Karol Liebknecht and other murdered activists that was erected in 1926 by Mies van der Rohe in the cemetery in the Lichtenberg district. In the USSR, Luxembourg did not have much luck either. In the tradition of the revolutionary movement, as an opponent of Lenin, she was considered as a controversial figure.

Born in Zamość, Rosa Luxemburg, the founder of Social Democracy in Poland and Germany, returns to Poland with Renata Kamińska's exhibition. The works are inspired by the Rosa's herbarium, collected from the weeds growing on the walls and courtyards of prisons, in which she stayed from 1913 to 1918, as well as by the pacifist demonstrations that she organised. Luxemburg studied botany in Zurich, abandoned it for economics and politics. The project materializes unrealized feminist and pacifist postulates, desires and fears - political, private, social and economic - presented in her writings that are still up to date.

Renata Kamińska
Born in Hrubieszów, grew up in Zamość, lived in several different countries at the streets of Rosa Luxemburg name. She graduated the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig and the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. She exhibited at Monique Goldstrom Gallery in New York, was a guest of the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, the CHERT Gallery in Berlin, and at the Aurora art biennale in Dallas.

 

Partners:
STUDIO Gallery, Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw
Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz, Berlin
Kunst im öffentlichen Raum, Zurich
"Synagogue" Center of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland

 

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