- Image Constellation Panel - MnemosynePictureAtlas - 
Image Constellation Panel by Philipp Schwalb
April 29, 2024, 5 pm – Angewandte, Painting department, Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna

100 years ago, the art historian and cultural scientist Aby Warburg was released from the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, run by the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, to return to Hamburg to his family, friends, colleagues and the newly founded institution, the Warburg Library of Cultural Studies (KBW). In the years that followed, the KBW became one of the most influential cultural institutions and transdisciplinary crossroads of the early 20th century. From the beginning of his research in Florence, Warburg was interested in reading images and seeing words in a network of interrelations and entanglements with other images, words, philosophies, historical and social dynamics. From 1926 to 1929, Aby Warburg worked on his last and most influential publication and instrument, the Mnemosyne Atlas (MA), which was never completed. The MA and the KBW are characterised by the fact that they were developed, discussed and carried out collaboratively, that they transcended the boundaries of subjects, fields, regions and definitions of art at the time, and that they employed comparative methods for images and texts that could link and question different stages of contextualisation of a work of art or its historical circumstances.

Image Constellation Panels (ICP) are located in the passage between studio and public, between practice and theory, and are instruments between exhibitions, lectures, mind maps of collected material and discursive assemblies. This ICP is about Aby Warburg, his methods, Bilderreihen, Florence, Warburg's discoveries and terminologies, the MnemosynePictureAtlas with its panels and the activities of the MnemosyneAtlas-Lab.

Philipp Schwalb lives and works in Rotterdam as an artist, reader, curator, and art educator. Since 2010 he has been experimenting with and questioning the animation of colour and figuration in Bilder, their communication, conditions, effects, and frameworks. In 2010 he co-founded 8. Salon in Hamburg, where in 2011 he initiated a research project on Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas. Until 2016, he co-edited the entire Mnemosyne Atlas and organised a research group, exhibitions, and events around it. In 2017 Schwalb co-founded the MNEMOSYNE study group in Zurich and Geneva. From 2017 to 2019 he was visiting professor for painting at the Haute Ecole d'art et Design in Geneva. From 2020 until now, he has been organising the MnemosyneAtlas-Lab online and live. Schwalb has exhibited or curated at the following venues: Kirchgasse (Steckborn), New Toni (Berlin), Le Frac Lorraine (Metz), Kunsthalle Langenthal, Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp (Cully), Kunsthalle Basel, ZKM Karlsruhe, Kunstraum München, Villa Romana (Florence), David Castillo (Miami).