ABY WARBURG

bilderatlas mnemosyne

as an art practice

BY MÜMTAZ SAĞLAM

"

BIlderatlas Mnemosyne practIce Is largely based on the Idea that vIewers experIence planes that blend culture and thought. It Is In a sequentIal unIty, juxtaposIng symbolIc elements wIth Images. It establIshes an Immanent and comprehensIble organisation through repetItIon. Thus, wIth a new mappIng approach, It reveals the relatIonal excess of modern thought, the new fIeld of thought created by subjective and objectIve knowledge. What Is essentIal here Is to develop and deepen the condItIons of connectIon, that Is, the relatIonal sItuatIon. Thus, It Is to operatIonalIse an aesthetIc practIce that we can call the archaeology of knowledge through new fIctIon possIbIlItIes and new materIal preferences.

bilderatlas deneysel düzenleme

Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (last version), Panel 39 (reconstruction by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, 2020). Photo: Tobias Wootton. (Warburg Institute/Fluid, London)

Bildereatlas Mnemosyne İçgörü

Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (last version), Panel 41 (reconstruction by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, 2020). Photo: Tobias Wootton. (Warburg Institute/Fluid, London)

Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, consisting of images arranged on numbered panels, attracted great attention in the context of the widespread use of photographic techniques and the idea or practice of collage and montage, which developed as an avant-garde strategy in the same period. Through Aby Warburg’s montage choices, the images, rearranged and positioned according to new relationships, are put into the service of new possibilities of meaning. Warburg, who understands exhibition making as an act of art, is the pioneer of approaches that realise the analysis and arrangement of images into distinctions as an artistic practice. Moreover, in Bilderatlas Minemosyne, the quality of the image makes it a source of interactive connections that make it attractive and appealing. The environment established by the proximity of similar elements is undoubtedly an interesting phenomenon of visual configuration. Occasionally bizarre coexistences emphasise relational thinking and sequences of images or words according to an iconology dedicated to new relationships in distant spaces. There is a provocative methodology of action-meaning that triggers new possibilities of organisation and memory beyond norms. In contemporary terms, a field of seeing and understanding is created here that evokes concepts and situations such as relational aesthetics or interdisciplinarity

Bilderatlas Minemosyne appears as if it were a montage of photocopies by a contemporary artist. However, studies on Warburg emphasise that these assemblages are not yet complete. Therefore, it would be misleading to see them as textless pictorial-visual experiments. The effort of imaginary organisation here is a kind of explanation, an attempt to show the relationship-examples between the supporting poles on the plane of ideas together in a comparative manner. In fact, what affects the artists is that they want to reach new mounting-installation solutions or scope diversity by finding artistic direction in the scope innovation shaped by imaginative diversity with panel/board style presentation. This is actually the experience of making possible the possibility of energetic presentation that makes room for the impossible with simultaneous constructions. Therefore, the issue of exhibition making and display, exemplified by Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, is like an experimental creative act that develops in a relational field.

bilderatlas mnemosyne as an art practice

Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (last version), Panel 46(reconstruction by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, 2020). Photo: Tobias Wootton. (Warburg Institute/Fluid, London)

bilderatlas mnemosyne as an art practice

Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (last version), Panel 77 (reconstruction by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, 2020). Photo: Tobias Wootton. (Warburg Institute/Fluid, London)

the logic of sequence, order and differentiation that turns into a preference for method

Here, we can talk about a situation that postpones the aesthetic-plastic quality of the arrangement. In other words, in Warburg, who uses photography and other visual elements for the transitivity of new possibilities of meaning, the plastic concerns that determine the arrangement are not prioritised. In fact, for the unprepared viewer, there is an irregular stacking and irregular imagery and mapping, trajectory determination or sampling that evokes ordinary and random coexistence. However; all the visuals used here are a mental collage containing horizontal transitivity, connection, space and depth of meaning, bringing together text-visual-object assemblage in a fluid collective memory metaphor. This assemblage space, as a mode of experience and production, or as an idea of sequence, already provides serious references to dynamic and useful attempts to create new spaces and organise space and objects. Warburg’s historical and epistemological mode of representation, the possibility of a methodological choice, the logic of sequence-order and distinction that creates depth, are interesting enough and point to the current intellectual accumulation and tense potential for mixed cultural knowledge and accumulation.

Seeing it as a phenomenon similar to montage and collage techniques is not entirely appropriate to its logic of operation. The logic of order and repetition here is based on an opening and display that is fed by the thematic framework from the outside, rather than being a creation. This is based on a liberating experience in which the viewer actively participates. Here we can speak of a flow that enriches the existing knowledge on the horizontal axis, thus not fixing it to a single interior. In this way, the atlas, which constructs a collective memory, gains importance as a daring attitude that realises memory experiences through photography-based representation.

fictionalising and visualising the history of the present

The imaginary and ideological background that determines or feeds the production of artists in the 2000s is the dialectic of action-environment and production that defines relational aesthetics. It investigates the processes of analysing contemporary art, the typological connections that become evident on the human being as the object of social and cultural change, and discusses the possibilities of deviation through production and meaning relations. It develops and harmonises the possibilities of possibility. On this plane, where the content is structured in a new and different way every moment on the basis of technical transitivity, it is aimed to create relational situations, quotation, transcendence, and to reach new forms of thought and meaning production through concepts belonging to different disciplines. In this respect, the meeting of East and East Asia and the West with such an appetite, the global interest that embraces the aesthetic sensitivity of African origin, the possibilities of meeting that eliminate distances and cultural divisions, undoubtedly necessitate new ways of thinking. Is this democratic development in the art scene a typical practice of globalisation? One has to wait. Is it an exit movement of local cultures that articulate with each other or gradually bring back their original character? This is largely a visible pattern of the new modernism. But it may also be a result of the demands of western thought, modernism, for a new knowledge, a new cultural connection. It is a demand for new content, form and similar cultural fields to be processed. It is clearly to dissolve the culture they came from in the new world and revitalise it. This attitude, look or behaviour is both a cultural resistance and a reconciliation of the new modern route for the purpose of adaptation. 

In this context, Warburg’s representational practice continues to be of great interest, as it enables complex or contradictory situations to be analysed and made visible. In the 1980s, in conjunction with the rise of postmodernism, it supported efforts to reformat art history. This system of thought and notion of representation, thus embraced, opens up a space for an interdisciplinary view and evaluation that extends to a relational aesthetics that is compatible and transitional with new conceptual expansions and developments in contemporary art. Historians such as Didi-Huberman and Uwe Fleckner emphasise Warburg’s conceptual approach, the transcendence of time, and especially the knowledge that the past and the present simultaneously disturb each other. Just as in the case of Tacita Dean, it complements and completes the approach of art as a practice that tries to explain a complex temporality and that shapes the narrative subject with anachronism.

Therefore, today, atlas projects continue to attract attention at the level of an intellectual solution and method as an applicable, renewable, reconstructible organising logic and approach that guides the way to understand the world.

a new experience of visualisation

Aby Warburg may in fact have created most of these panel assemblies for use in his lectures and conferences; he may have developed them with the aim of creating a visual space-universe that explains the issues or examples that form the basis of his views and directs the flow of thought. Naturally, the coexistence that takes place here is, at first glance, in an irregular shaping of forms. This directness is in accordance with the dynamism of flow. In the act of sorting and juxtaposition and placement, preference is given to preferences that reveal the intention of making the image visible and associating it, a spread that does not interrupt the narrative depth, or the desire for progression and deepening, rather than the effort of formal order and stacking. Therefore, the image-object arrangement placed on a black fabric background is like an interpretation of the montage techniques that would develop in the same period. For this reason, it is conceivable that the awareness created by Dadaist actions and procedures may have attracted and influenced this kind of presentation, aesthetic and visual context. However, it is not clear whether Warburg’s arrangements, which at first glance appear ordinary, received such support at their inception. 

Bilderatlas Mnemosyne practice is largely based on the idea that viewers experience planes that mix culture and thought. It is in a sequential unity, juxtaposing symbolic elements with images. It establishes an immanent and comprehensible organisation through repetition. Thus, with a new mapping approach, it reveals the relational excess of modern thought, the new field of thought created by subjective and objective knowledge. What is essential here is to develop and deepen the conditions of connection, that is, the relational situation. Thus, it is to operationalise an aesthetic practice that we can call the archaeology of knowledge through new fiction possibilities and new material preferences.    

As a result, the thematic coexistence exhibited in the panels attains a dimensional and in-depth methodological order that stimulates intellectual action and activates intercultural and out-of-time or trans-temporal memory and imagination in pursuit of intellectual and psychological distances.

Mümtaz Sağlam  Copyright © 2025, All Rights Reserved

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prof. mümtaz sağlam (Compiled by) Artist, art writer and curator. He has numerous publications on current issues, theoretical debates and prominent artist attitudes in the area of plastic arts. He lives and works in Izmir and London.

BILDERATLAS MNEMOSYNE  (1925 – 1929)

bilderatlas mnemosyne as an art practice

Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – The Original, 2020 (installation view). Photo: Silke Briel. (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin) Exhibition: Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – The Original, 4 September – 1 November 2020, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. 

With his recovery in 1924, Aby Warburg embarks on new research and study trips and drafts a number of important lectures. During this period, when the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne was created, he also prepared a series of paintings and exhibition projects to accompany his lectures. The arrangements to accompany the nature and length of his lectures are remarkable for their experimental quality and appearance. Moreover, the multiple connections of the didactic propositions reflected in these arrangements and their plasticity, which is suitable for linguistic enactment based on visual synchronicity, are of utmost importance. This approach shows that we are confronted with real experimental arrangements, with an exuberant display practice that replaces the linearity of the gaze, especially in the field of art history. Warburg used the atlas format in his picture arrangements, which can present the available visual material together and transform it into a completely independent medium. In this respect, atlas assemblages have both an epistemic and aesthetic dimension that exhibits open knowledge formations; they aim to present the intellectual and sensory quality of knowledge. With the atlas format, Warburg makes the artefacts, which exemplify the storage of strange or original data on the themes he explores in the social (visual) memory, the constant oscillations between wild thought and faith enlightenment, more vivid through their presentation rather than through a purely linguistic description. Each panel consists almost entirely of Warburg's distortions and montages of various paintings, maps, photographs, manuscripts, contemporary images from newspapers and magazines. Warburg's approach, in fact, developed a comprehensive art historical understanding of image migration, an analytical theoretical model with cultural-psychological references, which enabled the interaction of selected reproductions through their juxtaposition and contrast.

Bkz. Aby Warburg, Bilderreihen ve Ausstellungen. Gesammelte Schriften-Studienausgabe, Cilt II.2, Editörler: Uwe Fleckner ve Isabella Woldt, eds. Akademie Verlag, 471 pages, Almanca, 2012. 

GERHARD RICHTER’S ATLAS

Aby Warburg izinde

Gerhard Richter, Atlas, Tafel 5, 1962-1966, Albumfotos, 51,7 x 66,7 cm. https://www.gerhard-richter.com/de/art/atlas/newspaper-album-photos-11585

PREPARED BY  GÜLAY YAŞAYANLAR & MÜMTAZ SAĞLAM

ON ABY WARBURG VE BILDERATLAS MNEMOSYNE 

NEW EXHIBITIONS 

memory and migration 2024

EXHIBITION

memory&migration: Warburg Institute 1926 - 2024

Exhibition, 1 October – 30 December 2024, Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London. WC1H 0AB

This exhibition was organised to celebrate the completion of the Warburg Institute’s Warburg Renaissance project and the acquisition of new gallery spaces. Bringing together selected artists, writers and cultural historians, the exhibition is planned to present images and objects that reflect the history and development of the current collection. As is well known, the Warburg’s collections comprise a unique and uniquely assembled collection that links texts and images, social, scientific and magical elements of knowledge and images.

EXHIBITION

aby warburg: bilderatlas mnemosyne - the original

Exhibition, Curators: Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, 2 April – 22 June 2024, HKW Hause der Kulturen der Welt, in cooperation with the Warburg Institute London.

In his latest and unfinished project, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, art and cultural historian Aby Warburg traces recurring visual themes and patterns over time, from antiquity, through the Renaissance and beyond, to contemporary culture. His approach is of great significance for today’s visual culture and the image world dominated by digital imagery. In this exhibition, HKW presents 63 panels of Bilderatlas in a manner faithful to Warburg’s original images. 

EXHIBITION

aby warburg: mnemosyne bilderatlas: reconstruktion-commentary-revision

Exhibition, Curators: Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, 31 August – 13 November 2016, ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe.

On the occasion of Aby Warburg’s 150th birthday, the ZKM | Karlsruhe is exhibiting a complete reconstruction of his Bilderatlas in its original dimensions. In addition, 13 artist panels by contemporary artists round off the exhibition. These artists include Linda Fregni-Nagler, Sarah Lehnerer, Jochen Lempert, Jannis Marwitz, Paul McCarthy, Olaf Metzel and Matt Mullican, Albert Oehlen. This meeting clearly shows the interest that Bilderatlas attracts in art circles.

EXHIBITION

Aby Warburg: bilderatlas: reconstruktion-commentary-revision

Exhibition, Curator: Georges Didi-Huberman, 7 May – 7 August 2011, ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe. (Madrid – Karlsruhe- Hamburg)

According to exhibition curator Didi-Huberman, the idea behind the Atlas is not to collect masterpieces: The most important aspect of interest is the discovery of the sources on which the artists relied and which therefore make the various artistic procedures comprehensible. Thus, it is not Paul Klee’s watercolours that are on display here, but, inter alia, his modest herbarium and the graphic and theoretical ideas it inspired; it is not Josef Albers’ frames, but his photo album of images of pre-Columbian buildings.

BOOK PUBLICATIONS

E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Entellectual Biography / Phaidon Press Ltd. 456 pages, English, Hardback, August 1997.  

Uwe Fleckner, Der Blitz und die Schlange: Aby Warburgs Amerikanische Reise (Kulturgeschichte), Hatje Cantz Verlag, 150 pages, English, Hardback, November 2023.

Hans C. Hönes, Tanged Paths: A life of Aby Warburg, Reaktion Books, 288 pages, English, Hardcover, May 2024. 

Aby Warburg 150, Work, Legacy, Promise Edited by: David Freedberg and Claudia Wedepohl, 464 pages, De Gruyter Publishing, English, 1st Edition, April 2024.

Warburg and snake dance

Blitzsymbol und Schlangentanz: Aby Warburg und die Pueblo-Kunst (Kulturgeschichte) Authors: Christine Chaves and Uwe Fleckner, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 400 pages, English, hardcover, March 2022.

aby warburg

Lara Bonneau, Lire l’œuvre d’Aby Warburg à la lumière de ses Fragments sur l’expression, 264 pages, French Edition, softcover, Şubat 2022. 

Aby Warburg Miroirs de faille – À Rome avec Giordano Bruno et Édouard Manet, 1928-29, Edited: Maurizio Ghelardi, L’écarquille Published, French Edition, softcover, 224 pages, June 2011. 

 

aby warburg

Aby Warburg: Essay Florentins, Edited: Eveline Pinto and Sibylle Muller, Hazan Published, French Edition, softcover, 368 pages, April 2015. 

 

Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne / Das Original, Edited by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and The Warburg Institute; Roberto Ohrt, Axel Heil, Publisher: Bundeskunnsthalle Bonn, Hardcover 2020.

Christopher D. Johnson,  Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, Ithaca: Cornell University Library and Cornell University Press, 2012.

Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

Aby Warburg, Atlas Mnemosyne, Translator: Joaquin  Chamore Mielke, Akal Ediciones SA, 192 pages, Spanish, Hardcover, Marc 2010. 

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne / The Original, Edited by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and The Warburg Institute; Roberto Ohrt, Axel Heil, Publisher: Hatje Cantz, 184 pg. English, Hardcover 2020.

Gerhard Richter: Atlas, Editor: Helmut Friedel,  Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König/D.A.P., Second edition, Following the first of 1997. 862 pages. 2011. Köln/New York.

Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back?, Editor: Georges Didi Huberman, 421 pages, English, 2011.

atlas katalog ZKM

Aby Warburg: Mnemosyne Bilderatlas ZKM 2016, Editor: Georges Didi Huberman, Kartoffelverlag, Universal-futur-Bitch Press, 2016

ABY WARBURG

İZMİR - LONDON

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Can Sağlam - Gülay Yaşayanlar Mümtaz Sağlam, 2025.