"On Progress" - Roy Brand filozófus és kurátor előadása a MOME-n

On Wednesday, 11 May 2022 at 5:00 p.m. professor of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the Tel Aviv University in Jerusalem, philosopher and curator Roy Brand is delivering a public presentation entitled On Progress as a guest of MOME Doctoral School. 

We look forward to seeing you at the event. 

Venue: MOME UP building, Floor 4, _ Coworking space  

On Progress

How will the future look if we stop believing in the idea of progress? In this essay, I follow one work by the artist Tino Sehgal who is famous for raising critical and philosophical questions through his performances. In 2009, his project “This Progress” occupied the entire space of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. For six weeks, the modern museum was emptied of objects and filled only with people having conversations as they walk up the famous rotunda leading from the entrance to the skylight at the top of the building. “This Progress” was composed of hundreds of “interpreters” engaging thousands of visitors each day. The opening questions, posed by a child approximately ten years old, was “can you tell me what is progress?” The answer delineated the trajectory of the conversations with teenagers, young adults and seniors replacing each while leading the visitors. The walk revealed something of the temporal structure of experience, with one axis moving forward, while another spiral inwards. I use this example to discuss the difference between modern and contemporary art and tie artworks with the form of life of their times. I also discuss the relations between Habermas’ Public Sphere and the contemporary museum, elaborate on the experiential turn, and relate Wittgenstein’s “forms of life” to the experience of time and the work of art.  

Roy Brand is a philosopher and curator working at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and art. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv University. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. His book Art and the Form of Life was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the founder and director of Parterre Projects for Art and Philosophy in Tel Aviv.