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Emerging from the Image Index on Political Iconography, the Goethe-Institut in Shanghai, in cooperation with the Advanced School of Art and Humanities at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, presents the exhibition »Picture Memory«, which focuses on the political visual memory of contemporary press photographs. Building on Aby Warburg’s pioneering research on such pictorial testimonies, this exhibition—previously shown in the Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar at the University of Hamburg—brings together the results of a citizen science workshop held at the Warburg-Haus in the summer of 2023.

The exhibition examines current press photographs and their historical references, arranging them alongside related image motifs from visual memory into picture essays. The Image Index on Political Iconography, housed at the Warburg-Haus and comprising approximately 180,000 index cards featuring reproductions of artworks and other visual materials, served as a research tool for this project.

Until the end of September 2024, interested citizens of the Chinese metropolis will have the opportunity to view the plates created by Elif Akyüz, Uwe Fleckner, Laura Gronius, Luisa Kiendl, Jonna Künne, and Lukas Schepers, along with its accompanying texts translated into Chinese. The exhibition opened with lectures by Jiang Jun (Tongji University) and Uwe Fleckner, who presented »Picture Memory« in the context of the Chinese pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, which was also organized under the intellectual patronage of Aby Warburg.

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