To mark the 300th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s birth, the Einstein Forum is organizing a three-month festival of thought. The focus is on the installation “The Power of Enlightenment – Walking with Kant” by Saskia Boddeke and Peter Greenaway – to be experienced from August 24 to September 25, 2024 in the Orangery in Potsdam’s New Garden. A supporting program with three international conferences, art and music performances and the premiere of a spectacular theatrical production will shed light on the achievements of the most important philosopher of the Enlightenment.
Image above: Die Macht der Aufklärung. Walking with Kant, Film still: H is for Hope by Saskia Boddeke
For a long time, “Enlightenment” was an unwaveringly positive term, but since the middle of the last century it has come under increasing criticism. Today, it is good form to fundamentally attack the Enlightenment and its achievements. Were the Enlightenment thinkers naive optimists? Worse still, did they idolize technology and advocate a blind rule of reason over nature that destroys the foundations of our lives? Were they themselves racists and colonialists who glorified their own values as universal in order to use them to justify their exploitation?
Installation
The art installation conceived by Saskia Boddeke and Peter Greenaway in five multimedia spatial images comments on Kant’s appeal to base our actions on reason. Boddeke and Greenaway are known for their immersive, multimedia and sensually opulent spatial installations. The Einstein Forum invites visitors to experience the Enlightenment anew in a unique location. A panorama of Kant’s most important philosophical ideas is unfolded here in impressive impressions of light, sound and movement.
Five lavishly designed spatial images stage the achievements of the Enlightenment, above all the questions of freedom and human dignity – universal ideals that we need today more urgently than ever. After all, the indispensable basic values of our democracies – freedom, justice and solidarity – can be traced back to the ideas of the Enlightenment.
We enter the Age of Enlightenment through Kant’s study and begin our “Walk with Kant” there, which first takes us into the authoritarian and hierarchically rigid old world, the realm of the church and monarchy, whose dogmatism and absolute claims to power were smashed not least by Kant’s philosophy. In the storm of revolution, this “wind of change”, we finally also encounter the four horsemen of the apocalypse, who still terrify our atheistic minds today. In the end, we are faced with the question of whether there is still hope in a world threatened by new diseases, ever more merciless wars and a global climate catastrophe.
Conferences
In the end, we can only answer these questions through the use of reason, a joint reflection on our assumptions and values. To this end, the Einstein Forum has invited exceptional minds to three conferences in Potsdam and Berlin. In a meeting that took place at the beginning of July, the question of Enlightenment on Trial, which Kant himself had already raised, was explicitly posed again. At the end of August, the Einstein Forum, together with the Humboldt Forum, will bring together voices from all over the world to convince us once again of the necessity of enlightenment. Under the title Enlightenment in the World, the aim is to make it clear that – contrary to today’s accusations that the Enlightenment is Eurocentric – the ideas of the Enlightenment have always been the result of reason developing across borders and continents and should continue to be the instrument for human rights, democracy and a just society in the future. The last conference in the series, The Universalism of Paul Robeson, will pay tribute to this unparalleled thinker, artist and activist and show how the ideals of the Enlightenment can continue to be lived.
Accompanying program
Extraordinary artistic performances can be experienced in the exhibition rooms of the art installation on several evenings. The first highlight is Tino Sehgal’s This Situation on September 6-8.
On September 13, 14 and 15, 2024, the premiere of Lord of the Air, a play specially produced for the occasion by composer and singer Daniel Kahn, who musically interprets Daniel Kehlmann’s bestseller Tyll, will take place. It impressively depicts the world before the Enlightenment and makes it possible to sensually experience what we owe to the Age of Reason.
The second musical event is a new interpretation of Mozart’s Magic Flute by the highly acclaimed British chamber opera ensemble Wild Arts, accompanied by a lecture by philosopher Martha Nussbaum from her forthcoming book on opera.
WHEN?
Opening: Friday, August 23, 2024, 6 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, August 24 – Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Final opening: Wednesday, September 25, 2024, 6 pm
Opening hours: Monday – Sunday, 11 am – 5.30 pm
WHERE?
Orangerie im Neuen Garten
Im Neuen Garten 6
14469 Potsdam
COST?
8,50 EUR, reduced 6 EUR
