NYU - New York University
01/17/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 01/17/2025 10:19
80WSE Gallery Presents Exhibitions Focused on Radical Philosophers
Kevin Kelly's evocative film, 'Caute,' examines the life and philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.
NYU's 80WSE Gallery presents a contemporary exploration of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and an outdoor installation on the 20th-century thinker and activist Simone Weil. Both examine the topics of freedom and leading good and true lives in the face of political turmoil, exclusion, and repression. The exhibitions open January 31.
With support from 80WSE, Kevin Kelly's evocative film, Caute, explores Spinoza's life and philosophy by weaving footage of the places in Amsterdam where he lived and worked with experimental techniques that recall his intellectual journey. Sensuous and visually fragmented, the 20-minute film illuminates Spinoza's revolutionary ideas linking God and nature, the dynamics of emotion, and the concept of intellectual autonomy. It will be shown in the gallery's Project Space through March 15, 2025.
80WSE will use its Washington Square Windows for Simone Weil: On the Abolition of All Political Parties, on view through May 15, 2025. Tapping into the Sylvère Lotringer Papers and Semiotext(e) Archive at NYU's Fales Library and Special Collections, the three-panel exhibit also features a new English translation by Laura Mitterand of Weil's landmark essay. Published posthumously with the support of her friend and peer, Albert Camus, the work is a critique of how political parties suppress individual desire and moral conscience by transforming them into collective passions that are easily manipulated.
Simone Weil is the subject of a public art installation at NYU's 80WSE art gallery.
The idea is to look through the lens of radical philosophers to think about our contemporary moment, says 80WSE curator Howie Chen.
"Amidst tremendous political, environmental, and everyday turmoil, people are anxious about their own agency and what they can do as individuals to live and act in ways that can impact our society in real ways," Chen says. "Weil was an example of somebody who truly put theory and practice together."
Born in Amsterdam in 1632, Spinoza was in his twenties when he was exiled from the Amsterdam Sephardic Jewish community. He worked as a lens grinder for microscopes and telescopes, a profession that informed his philosophic ideas. His writings on religious and political freedom remain relevant today. The title of Kelly's work references his motto: Be careful.
"The film gives you a feel of his environs, what he would phenomenologically experience day to day," Chen says of Kelly's work. "There's only a few narrative moments, otherwise it's very atmospheric and constructed in a really engaging and sensuous way."
French philosopher Weil (1909-1943) was also renowned as a political activist and mystic. She worked at a Renault auto factory in Paris and volunteered for the resistance in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco. Born into a Jewish family, she converted to Christianity as an adult.
"These exhibitions resonate conceptually and philosophically because they show how we can take historical subjects and use them to think about the present in rigorous and urgent ways," Chen says.
80WSE is at 80 Washington Square East. Gallery hours for Caute are Tuesday-Saturday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. The Weil installation can be viewed 24/7.
Admission to 80WSE is free. An opening reception will be held January 31 from 6 to 8p.m.
About 80WSE
Founded in 1974, NYU Steinhardt's 80 Washington Square East Gallery is a not-for-profit gallery presenting contemporary and historical exhibitions. In addition to the main gallery, it exhibits work at the Broadway Windows at East 10th Street and Broadway. For more information, please visit the gallery's website.