In the Evening There is Feeling: Reading Rosa Luxemburg

#DCAgalleries

In the Evening There is Feeling is DCA’s Exhibitions reading group. It takes its name from Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book Tender Buttons and focuses, in an informal and welcoming way, on feminist and/or queer texts from the worlds of art and literature.

This season, set alongside Douglas Gordon’s work that considers relationships in different geographical and historical contexts in both Poland and Germany, we are looking at a key early 20th-century thinker on power and radical politics: Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919).

Born in Zamość, Poland, Rosa Luxemburg is widely regarded as one of the most creative writers of modern socialism and the foremost female theoretician of European radicalism. Her wide-ranging and incisive works, which include studies on capitalism’s drive for global expansion, the relation between spontaneity and organisation, and the inseparability of democracy and socialism, have made her a touchstone for thinkers and activists around the world. Her fiercely independent intellect and uncompromising defence of human liberty speak powerfully to our present moment.

This session will consider a selection of excerpts from The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, reading some key correspondence written to Luxemburg’s comrades, friends and lovers in her lifetime.

Digital copies of selected texts will be sent out to all participants upon booking a place.

Image: Douglas Gordon, k.364, 2011 Video installation. Dimensions variable. 51 min, looped © Studio lost but found / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020