1. Accompanying the research exhibition After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer is a public lecture by exhibition curator and FORMER WEST research advisor Boris Groys. The lecture focuses on Kojève’s multifaceted biography, his renowned philosophical positions, and the developments in his work and thinking over the course of his eventful life. Departing from reflections on Kojève’s biography, Groys explores the remarkable relationship between Kojève’s writing and photographic practice.

        Groys shows how the themes probed in Kojève’s artistic practice are relevant to problems that arise in contemporary culture such as how to posit art and artistic expression in a time where belief in societal and cultural progress seems to have lost its standing. In doing so, Groys aptly illustrates how this long-hidden collection is of vast importance to our understanding of the present moment and its corresponding challenges.