Black Atlas is 57 minutes in length and begins on the hour, every hour.
Public events will be ticketed, free, and available to book via the Warburg website (see list below).
This project explores the Image of the Black archive – a collection of over 30,000 images which documents representations of people of African descent from antiquity to the civil rights era. Developed by Edward George during a 12 month residency at the Warburg Institute, the exhibition features a new film commission, and marks the first time that images from the archive have been exhibited in the UK.
The Image of the Black archive was launched by French-American art collectors, patrons and philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil in the 1960s in response to the civil rights movement in the USA. The project employed leading scholars to create a collection of reference photographs of paintings, sculpture, manuscripts, decorative arts, and other objects from Western art that depict people of African descent. From the mid-1970s, these were published in a multi-volume book series with accompanying art historical scholarship and context; the fifth in the ongoing series was published in 2014. Originally established in Paris and later expanded with an office in Houston, the Paris version of the archive is housed at the Warburg as part of its Photographic Collection, and the Houston version at Harvard University as part of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
George has drawn on the archive to produce a new film: a poetic ‘image essay’ built from sequences of the collection’s images, reanimating the archive as both a site of cultural history and a tool for speculative thinking. The images are narrated by George – producing a meditation on time, place, and presence; and on art as a medium of transcendence, a technology of power, and an affirmation of a humanist, anti-racist project.
Black Atlas takes its point of departure from Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a series of panels of collaged images assembled by Warburg that trace recurring motifs through from antiquity to modernity. In keeping with Warburg’s associative and visual approach to history and memory, the project explores the reinvention and reappropriation of images and visual tropes in Western art across time – through images drawn from the archive that, in George’s framing, ‘have leapt out and staked a claim on the present,’ provoking new lines of associative thought.
Alongside the film, George displays triptychs of collaged panels of images as an unfolding visual history that will change over the course of the exhibition. These shifting constellations of images offer an open-ended, interpretive meditation on the figures, forms, and echoes that emerge from the archive across time, resisting any singular or fixed meaning in response to Warburg’s original Atlas panels.
