{"id":84984,"date":"2025-08-15T14:52:17","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T14:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/84984\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T14:52:17","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T14:52:17","slug":"connecting-the-heavens-and-earth-through-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/84984\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting the Heavens and Earth Through Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

HAMBURG, Germany \u2014 In the 1920s, Hamburg-born art historian Aby Warburg assembled his famed Mnemosyne Atlas \u2014 a vast, unfinished compendium of uncaptioned images on 40 categorized panels. Around the same time, he put together his\u00a0Image Collection on the History of Astrology and Astronomy, a similar array of pictures on panels illustrating that humans have always looked to the heavens to understand themselves and the world, both scientifically and spiritually. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Created for the Hamburg Planetarium\u2019s opening in 1930, the latter work was shown there as World War II broke out. For decades, the original collection was considered lost, until art historian Uwe Fleckner found it in a trash heap in 1987. Its Fleckner-curated reconstruction is now on view in the uppermost portion of same planetarium as the cornerstone of From the Cosmos to the Commons<\/a> \u2014 a constellation of exhibitions, public artworks, and discursive events orbiting Warburg\u2019s opus in various locations in Hamburg until late August, in an ambitious project initiated by the city curator, Joanna Warsza.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0Installation view of Aby Warburg\u2019s Image Collection in the Hamburg Planetarium<\/p>\n

Visitors use flashlights to see Warburg\u2019s densely decorated panels, arranged in a compact elliptical parcours in the normally inaccessible, low-light space atop the Planetarium. Reproductions of drawings and diagrams of the sky, and its many related legends, trace the histories of planetary thinking from antiquity to Kepler\u2019s ideas of heliocentricity, Dante\u2019s world view, Eastern and Western astrological symbolism, and much more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is the point of departure for the show, which considers the wonderment, fear, and humility\u00a0that the skies have always evoked in our species \u2014 but also the physical and spiritual orientation the heavens have consistently provided. In the same dark room, four contemporary artworks explore space, time, and how nonwestern cultures saw or see the heavens: \u201cBlood Moon\u201d (2025) by Raqs Media Collective asks us to consider the lunar aspects of time, and \u201cIkt\u00f3miwi\u014b (A Vision of Standing Cloud)\u201d (2023\/25), an intricate mandala-like floor piece\u00a0by Ogl\u00e1la Lak\u021f\u00f3ta artist KITE, records both time and dreams (this iteration is made of local stones).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Outdoors, in the adjacent Stadtpark, 12 sculptural works are scattered around the lawns, trees, and clearings to be discovered by art lovers and joggers alike: Agnes Denes\u2019s \u201cSunflower Fields\u201d(2025) binds earth and sky with planted sun-loving blooms, while Heidi Voet\u2019s \u201cHydra & the Orange Giant\u201d (2025) brings the heavens down to earth \u2014 her pastel concrete sports balls lie in the grass in the Stadtpark\u2019s old natural amphitheater reflecting the constellation Hydra. Still others look at divination, like Xul Solar\u2019s \u201cTarot Deck\u201d (1954), a set of oversized tarot cards on the park lawn; or cosmological legends, such as Hoda Tawakol\u2019s \u201cCosmic Womb,\u201d an installation depicting Nut, the Egyptian goddess who swallowed the sun each night, and rebirthed it each morning.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Heidi Voet, \u201cHydra & the Orange Giant\u201d (2025) in the Hamburg Stadtpark\u2019s old amphitheater<\/p>\n

Across town at Kunsthaus Hamburg, a second part of the project, titled Between Stars and Signals<\/a>, flips these themes around. While Warburg\u2019s image collection places equal weight on rational and irrational, this group show highlights how the skies are now surveilling us: Record-keeping, precise data-gathering, and algorithms have, after all, dramatically shifted what humanity orients itself upon. Works including numbers 211 and 248 of Trevor Paglen\u2019s Clouds series, which turns an algorithmic gaze to the sky, and Nolan Oswald Dennis\u2019s \u201crecurse 4 a late planet (lush)\u201d (2025), a rich diagram that considers the connections between asteroids and rocks thrown in protest, seem to ask: What are our cosmologies today?<\/p>\n

Wars, climate chaos, and digital intelligence are just some of what make this moment in human history one of great communal disorientation, fragmented perception, and temporal confusion. From the Cosmos to the Commons doesn\u2019t let us conveniently forget this, but rather reminds us, perhaps in a reassuring, life-affirming way, that humanity has struggled to explain and orient itself under the same skies since time immemorial. These works seem to nudge us to reconsider more intuitive ways of existing, even thriving, in creation\u2019s vastness \u2026 together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"KITE,\u00a0\u201cIkt\u00f3miwi\u014b (A Vision of Standing Cloud)\u201d (2023\/25)<\/p>\n

\"\"Xul Solar, \u201cTarot Deck\u201d (1954)<\/p>\n

\"\"Detail of\u00a0Nolan Oswald Dennis\u2019s \u201crecurse 4 a late planet (lush)\u201d<\/p>\n

From the Cosmos to the Commons<\/a> continues at the Hamburg Planetarium (Linnering 1, Hamburg, Germany) and Kunsthaus Hamburg (Klosterwall 15, Hamburg, Germany) through August 24. The exhibition was organized by Joanna Warsza, who curated the Stadtpark portion. The Planetarium portion was curated by Uwe Fleckner and the Kunsthaus Hamburg portion was curated by Anna Nowak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HAMBURG, Germany \u2014 In the 1920s, Hamburg-born art historian Aby Warburg assembled his famed Mnemosyne Atlas \u2014 a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88,21798],"class_list":{"0":"post-84984","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-hamburg"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}