Roads to Freedom. Paintings by Ewa Jeziorska-Karwowska and Idri Draman

Ewa Jeziorska-Karwowska, a Lublin painter and printmaker, and Idri Draman, a painter from Kabylia living in exile in Poland, are showing their work together in the Kościuszko Manor House inside the UMCS Botanical Garden. The show opened on Friday 16 October 2026 at 17:00. The garden has not given a closing date, and from November the garden itself is closed for the winter. It publishes its text in Polish only, so the quotation below is our translation.

UMCS Botanical Garden on the exhibition:

The UMCS Botanical Garden is hosting in the Kościuszko Manor House in Lublin artists who represent two nations: Poland and the Kabyles, who live in Kabylia, a region of Algeria. Despite the differences of time and space that divide them, both nations share a rich tradition of struggle for freedom and independence.

Poland’s road to independence is a source of inspiration and hope for the Kabyles. The figure of Tadeusz Kościuszko and his unbending stance in the fight for independence and for equal rights for all people inspire admiration and remain an important symbol of the striving for freedom.

The experience of the Kabyles reminds us Poles that freedom is not given once and for all. Both nations know the price of independence and the hard road to regaining it. The meeting of Polish and Kabyle artists thus becomes not only a dialogue of cultures but also a meeting of two nations united by the memory of the struggle for their own identity and the right to freedom.

What to expect

The venue suits the theme. Kościuszko, whom the garden presents as a symbol of freedom for the Kabyles, stayed in this manor in 1774-1775. The garden gives neither the number of works nor the rooms they hang in. The announcement speaks of painting, but the garden’s events calendar lists the same show as an exhibition of prints and painting.

The artists’ profiles in the announcement suggest what to look for on the walls:

• Idri Draman paints the landscapes and traditional villages of Kabylia: old stone architecture, ruins, roots and mountains. A recurring motif is the traditional tattoos of Kabyle women. He begins each painting with a single spontaneous gesture and builds the composition from it.
• Ewa Jeziorska-Karwowska works in both printmaking and painting techniques. Since her student years she has been drawn to the culture of the Polish nobility and to Polish identity; her master’s thesis dealt with the Sarmatian portraits in the museum in Sieradz.

With the announcement the garden published a poster showing four paintings and a black-and-white print of a woman’s portrait, with no titles and no attribution. The poster gives the title in three languages: Polish (“Drogi wolności”), Kabyle (“Avrid n tlelli”) and French (“Le chemin de la liberté”). It also names three fields - painting, engraving and music - and two musicians, Agur and Kamila, without giving a date for their performance.

Context

Kabylia is a mountainous coastal region of northern Algeria, about 50 km east of Algiers. The Djurdjura range runs through it, and its main town is Tizi Ouzou. The Kabyles are a Berber people who speak Kabyle, written in the Latin alphabet. By estimates cited on Wikipedia, as many as half of them live outside Kabylia, most of them in France.

The Kabyle struggle for freedom has been above all about language and self-government. In 1980 the authorities suppressed student protests in Tizi Ouzou, later called the Berber Spring. After the unrest of 2001, in which about 80 people died, Tamazight became a national language in 2002, and since 2016 it has been an official language of Algeria. The Mouvement pour l’autonomie de la Kabylie (MAK), founded in 2001, later began to call for the region’s independence.

According to the announcement, Idri Draman graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Kabylia in 2010, took part in festivals in France and Greece and staged a performance in Canada. He was forced to leave his homeland. Ewa Jeziorska-Karwowska graduated in printmaking from the UMCS Faculty of Arts in 1981 and in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź in 2013. She co-founded the Stanisław Wyspiański Private High School in Lublin and the Lublin School of Art and Design, and her work has been shown in New York, Paris and Thessaloniki, among other places.

Tickets and time

The garden sets no separate exhibition ticket. The manor is entered on the combined garden-and-manor ticket: 18 PLN standard, 15 PLN reduced, 50 PLN family; the garden alone costs 16 PLN and 11 PLN. The garden states plainly that entry to the manor is charged extra at its ticket office. Children under five go free; season-pass holders and UMCS alumni card holders pay 5 PLN for the manor. Buy at the ticket office on ul. Willowa or online.

The manor keeps shorter hours than the garden. According to the hours page, in October it is open Tuesday to Friday 10:00-14:00 and on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays 10:00-16:00. The garden is open daily 9:00-17:00, and the ticket office sells until 16:30. These hours hold until the end of the season, 31 October. The online ticket page gives different manor hours under a 2025 season heading, until 18:00 from Friday to Monday. Those longer hours cannot apply, since the garden closes at 17:00 in October.

Go before the end of October. The garden has not said how long the show will run, and the show is not on its list of current exhibitions. The season lasts until 31 October 2026, and from November the garden is closed for its winter break. The manor stands inside the garden, so the garden’s pages offer no way to see the show after 31 October. Whether the manor will open separately the garden has not said; that is our reading of its pages, not a statement by the garden.

The price list has no general free day. Holders of the Lublin Senior Card (Lubelska Karta Seniora) enter the garden free on Mondays; whether that covers the manor the garden does not say. The discount rules are on the garden’s discount programmes page .

Allow 20-30 minutes for the manor; that is our estimate, as the garden gives neither a visiting time nor the number of works. A show of Chodzież porcelain also occupies the same building until 30 October 2026.

Who it is for: anyone curious about Kabylia and Berber culture, lovers of contemporary landscape painting, and anyone heading to the garden anyway. Who can skip it: anyone after old art, or coming only for Kościuszko mementoes. The garden describes the show in Polish only and does not say what language the captions are in.

See also

• Kościuszko Manor House - a reconstruction of the manor where Tadeusz Kościuszko stayed in 1774-1775; the profile covers the way there, the entrance and the history of the place.
• In the Flower Garden - Chodzież porcelain with plant motifs, in the same building and on the same ticket.
• Nature as Inspiration, Place and Material - sculpture by Maria Polakowska-Prokopiak set outdoors in the garden until the end of the season.
• Copts. From Egypt to Podlasie - another Lublin show about a community from North Africa: photographs of Coptic monasteries in the Trinity Tower.

Opening hours are on the garden’s hours page , prices on its ticket page , and the announcement of the show on the garden’s news page , all in Polish.

Museum profile: Kościuszko Manor House .