Ravensbrück Memorial Museum
Exhibition Opening: The Poplar Trees Avenue: An Alternative Archive // Rotem Bidas
13. September 2026 – 13:30 Uhr
Nature was never neutral at Ravensbrück. When the camp was extended, the SS had rows of fast-growing poplars planted, and the landscape itself became part of a topography of power. Today, most of these trees have fallen and lie across the former camp grounds. Since 2023, the Israeli artist Rotem Bidas has been working with the fallen trunks, approaching them not as metaphors but as sources. In doing so, she pursues a question that is more pressing than ever: Where does memory reside once the voices that carried it are gone?
Between 2023 and 2026, Rotem Bidas transferred the bark and cut surfaces of the fallen trunks onto paper as large-scale direct prints and frottages at a scale of 1:1. The image is not created through representation, but through contact between the body, the material, and the site. Trunks, roots, and growth rings become alternative documents through which history may be read. In this way, the grounds marked by the camp become an archive in which the trees become witnesses.
The Ravensbrück Memorial opens the special exhibition "The Poplar Trees Avenue: An Alternative Archive" on Sunday, 13 September 2026, at 1:30 pm in the Former Waterworks, as part of the nationwide Heritage Day (Tag des offenen Denkmals). The exhibition is on view until 10 May 2027, and admission is free.
The programme will be held in English, without interpretation. Please register by 9 September 2026 at gedenkstaettearavensbrueckode.
Programme
1:30 pm
Welcome: Dr Simone Erpel, Chair of The International Friends Association of the Ravensbrück Memorial, and Aliena Stürzer, Head of Museology
Introduction to the exhibition: Rotem Bidas, artist, and Dr Yarden Stern, curator
Followed by a tour of the exhibition with the artist and the curator
A sweet greeting for the new year: 13 September is also Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year
From 3 pm
Tour of the memorial grounds with Aliena Stürzer
In spring 2027, a discursive programme of public conversations and workshops will accompany the exhibition.
Funders
Funded by the Internationaler Freundeskreis der Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück e. V., the Dr. Hildegard Hansche Stiftung, the Cultural Department of the Embassy of the State of Israel and the Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa.
Venue
Ravensbrück Memorial Museum
Straße der Nationen
16798 Fürstenberg/Havel
Getting there: Shuttle from Fürstenberg/Havel railway station to the Memorial, departing at 1:10 pm
