After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May–15 July 2012; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 21 September–16 November 2012; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 17 October 2012–7 January 2013. In a darkened room stand seven podiums, like black treadmills at a standstill. Each faces a digitized photograph projected onto a bare wall. The humming projectors are interrupted every thirty seconds as new images replace old ones. Nearly 400 photographs comprise the endless repetition that forms the core of the exhibition After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer. The French philosopher took these photographs in the 1950s and 1960s during his travels as a bureaucrat for the French Ministry of Economic Affairs. Seven geographical regions in all: China (1967), Japan (1959 and 1967), South Asia (India, Ceylon, Nepal 1959 and 1968), the Soviet Union (1968), Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Switzerland in 1963 and 1964), Iran (1965 and 1968) and France (between 1959 and 1964). The photographs, as well as the thousands of postcards contemporaneously collected by Kojève that comprise the second half of the exhibition, are a recent discovery by the curator, Boris Groys, in the archives of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris. From the perspective of [...]
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