Journal

Picture Memory: An exhibition about the political visual memory of contemporary press photographs

Hangzhou, China Academy of Art, 17. September – 20. Oktober 2024

After its stop at the Goethe-Institut in Shanghai, the »Picture Memory« exhibition has now reached its second venue in China, the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. There it can be seen on the iconic Xiangshan Campus, which was built by the Chinese Pritzker Award winner Wang Shu in 2011-2013.

Originating from the Image Index on Political Iconography, the exhibition focuses on the political visual memory of contemporary press photographs. Following on from Aby Warburg’s thematic and methodological research into such pictorial testimonies, this presentation, first shown in the rooms of the Department of Art History at the University of Hamburg, brings together the results of a citizen science workshop held at the Warburg House in summer 2023 with the support of the university’s transfer agency.

The exhibition examines current press photographs and their historical references by filtering out related image motifs from visual memory and arranging them into image essays. The Image Index on Political Iconography, which is kept in the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg, served as a research tool with its approximately 180,000 index cards containing reproductions of works of art and other materials.

Students of art history and other disciplines at the China Academy of Art now have a month-long opportunity to study the presentation created by Elif Akyüz, Uwe Fleckner, Laura Gronius, Luisa Kiendl, Jonna Künne and Lukas Schepers, as well as the accompanying texts translated into Chinese.

Aby Warburg / Politische Ikonographie