©Ruedi Baur
Poster for the Celebration of World Philosophy Day 2011 at UNESCO

World Philosophy Day 2011 will be the occasion to host at UNESCO’s Headquarters the American artist Paul Sikora’s mobile installations, representing interplays between balance, space and time.

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” T.S. Eliot, Dante

Mobiles inhabit four dimensions because, with the element of time that comes with the movement of shifting expressions of space, they draw sculpture into the realm of temporal arts as music, theatre and dance. Balance, however, is the sense to which they communicate most subtly but most powerfully, the sense rooted deeply in the brain stem that prevented ancient ancestors from falling from trees and prevents modern humans from tumbling from bicycles. Everyone uses balance constantly, everyone takes it for granted until they encounter a counterintuitive composition that seems to defy it and, at the instant, evokes another ancient sense too easily lost in the modern age: wonder. And another, delight. And the artist’s favorite, play.

“We play gladly and think gladly because in these activities we feel ourselves masters of the situation: the space of play and the space of thought are the two theaters of freedom.” Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

A presentation by the Artist of his work will take place at 4 p.m.