2025

Museum Bozar–Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels

Familiar Strangers / MIEDZA

Curated by Joanna Warsza

MIEDZA by Renata Rara Kaminska

14 Mar.’25 → 29 June’25

BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts

MIEDZA, Installation 2025 / 1200 x 400 x 500 cm

Commissioned by Bozar–Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, Courtesy of the artist

“Do you know, sometimes I have the feeling that I am not a real human being, but some kind of bird, or another animal in human form. Inside, I feel far more at home in a little scrap of garden like this, or in a field among bumblebees and grass than at a party conference.” – Róża Luxemburg, Letters from Prison, 1917.

Róża Luxemburg (1871-1919) is best known as an internationalist, an anti-imperialist, and a Marxist revolutionary. She has been considered a key figure in Germany’s anti-war and socialist movements from the late 19th and early 20th century. She is, however, less recognised as a Polish Jew and a passionate self-taught botanist. Since the end of the Communist era, Luxemburg’s legacy in Eastern Europe has been obscured and
forgotten, also because she considered nationalism as a violent tendency. Artist Renata Rara Kaminska (lives in Berlin), who shares Luxemburg’s birthplace, the city of Zamosc has devoted a number of artworks to the revolutionary. The installation presented here refers to Luxemburg’s herbariums made during her years in prison in Wrocław shortly before her death. The herbarium becomes the garden Luxemburg always wished for and never managed to have. Miedza is full of dried flowers, weeds and wild plants that Luxemburg, and the artist after her, have been collecting such as thistles, nettles or trefoils. They pay tribute to the act of growing despite all odds, refusing to be unnecessary, keeping on going. Wild plants, which are often considered as uninvited guests, can in fact be essential in healing
processes and stubborn in the will to grow. Something Róża Luxemburg always looked for, both in forests and in politics.