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In 2024, the Warburg-Haus continues its two-year focus topic »Dynamics of Form«, which began in 2023. It invites a wide range of inquiries and perspectives to question both theoretical traditions of form reflection and to discuss concrete artistic and cultural (non-)forms. What cultural power do forms unfold in images and ideas?

Cultural and artistic forms as well as forms shaping societies forms are not firm and fixed, but always in motion. They emerge under particular conditions and they stabilize, establish and change across different times and cultural spaces. The question of the dynamics of forms allows us to pay closer attention to the forces at work in their migration and transmission. What is the relationship between their intrinsic potentials and the external influence of actors in changing historical, social, or political contexts? And how do art and culture reflect changes in their forms? Problems of form in the very literal sense are to be investigated, that is, geneses and adaptations, which possibly allow for insights into their dynamic preconditions precisely where the forms remain incomplete, or dissolve. What special role, then, do ephemeral, elusive, or distorted forms play?

Research into the emergence and reproduction of forms as well as their flexibility and elasticity has a long tradition at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg. With his philosophy of symbolic forms, Ernst Cassirer laid the foundation for a philosophy of human culture; Aby Warburg investigated the medial conditions of the distortion and transformation of pictorial formulas in the process of migratory movements. These traditions have been and are being continued in the projects ›Bilderfahrzeuge‹ (BMBF) on the materiality of pictorial traditions, in the project of digitizing the ›Image Index of Political Iconography‹ (DFG) as well as in the Centre for Advanced Studies ›Imaginaria of Force‹ (DFG), in which dynamic conceptions of the arts are discussed.

The program of scientific lectures and conferences takes place in close cooperation with the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies ›Imaginaria of Force‹ (Universität Hamburg) and the NOMIS research group ›Traveling Forms‹ (University of Konstanz). In autumn 2024, an international Warburg Seminar on ›Energy Landscapes‹ is organized by the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies ›Imaginaria of Force‹ and the Warburg-Haus.

Asp art of the focus topic lecture series, 2024 Warburg Professor Rafael Cardoso, Rio de Janeiro, Eckart Goebel, Tübingen, Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies ›Imaginaria of Force‹, Natan Sznaider, Tel Aviv, Universität Hamburg Fellow 2023-2024 at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study and Claudia Swan, St. Louis, Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies ›Imaginaria of Force‹, will speak in the first half of the year. Further events in cooperation with partners complete the programme: A projection of the new feature film Die Amitié. Ein Netzwerkfilm (Germany, 2023) by the collective Amitié in the reading room in cooperation with Flexibles Flimmern – Das mobile Kino, a dialogic tour of the artistic intervention Lost Homes / To Forget Beautiful Things by Israeli artist Hila Laviv in the Altonaer Museum, a concert and talk in the reading room about the splitting light compositions by Hamburg composer Michael Maierhof together with art historian Ursula Panhans-Bühler as part of blurred edges – Festival für aktuelle Musik 2024, a seminar in the exhibition Water Pressure. Designing for the Future at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, as well as a dialogic tour of the international group exhibition in the Gallery of Contemporary Art at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, untranquil now: A constellation of narratives and resonances.

Journal

Dynamics of Form II

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