The Warburg Institute invites members of the RSA to a special tour of a new online resource that makes available to a wide international audience two major exhibitions in Berlin devoted to Aby Warburg’s unfinished magnum opus, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne:
Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne - the Original, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), curated by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil in collaboration with the Warburg Institute; and
Between Cosmos and Pathos: Berlin Works from Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, at the Gemäldegalerie.
The tour will be held on 18 November 2020 at 5:00 p.m. (UK time) and guided by Professor Bill Sherman (Director, Warburg Institute) and Dr Claudia Wedepohl (Archivist, Warburg Institute).
Register Here The exhibitions opened to great acclaim this autumn, but the coronavirus prevented many people from seeing them, and with the recent lockdown of German museums, the only way to visit is now online. The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne Virtual Exhibition provides a digital afterlife and an enduring resource and the Warburg Institute would like to give RSA members a guided tour of this virtual tour. Aby Warburg (1866-1929), founder of the Warburg Institute, spent the last years of his life attempting to map our collective cultural memory through an ‘atlas of images’ that he named Mnemosyne, after the Greek goddess of memory. By the time of his death, Warburg had arranged 971 images on 63 large black panels. This unfinished magnum opus is at once a map of ancient images and one of modernity’s foundational projects. Known only from the black-and-white photos taken before Warburg’s death, the Bilderatlas has become a legend for scholars, artists and curators. The exhibition at HKW reconstituted the 63 panels of the Atlas for the first time since 1929 from Warburg’s original working materials preserved at the Warburg Institute. Parallel to the exhibition at HKW, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin presented in the Gemäldegalerie, Kulturforum, an unprecedented collection of 50 objects pictured in Warburg’s Atlas, gathered from 10 of Berlin’s state museums. The Bilderatlas is a masterpiece which draws on Warburg’s intellectual preoccupation with the afterlife (‘Nachleben’) of images and motifs, and how their continuity or metamorphosis as emotionally charged visual tropes resonates from antiquity to contemporary society. The Virtual Exhibition has been created with financial support from the Warburg Charitable Trust and technical direction from Marco Vedana at documentart.de. It allows visitors to explore the content of both exhibitions online and enables them to move freely between the panels of images at HKW and the original artworks in the Gemäldegalerie. The site also features interviews with the creators of the exhibitions, and selected objects are accompanied by expert commentary.