On Thursday 4 March at 6pm (GMT), Apollo and the Warburg Institute present ‘Cinema and the Museum’, in its ‘Museums of the Mind’ discussion series. The artist John Akomfrah, the critic and screenwriter Emilie Bickerton and Deborah N. Landis, director of the David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design at UCLA, will be in conversation with Fatema Ahmed, deputy editor of Apollo.
Over the course of a year in which many museums have been closed for months, it has become clear that they continue to give us much to think about even when we cannot visit them.
Apollo, in partnership with the Warburg Institute, presents ‘Museums of the Mind’ – a series of discussions about how museums reflect and refract art forms and other fields that may not traditionally have been considered their preserve. What happens when poetry, cinema or dance enter a museum? How do these encounters ask us to reimagine both the museum and the discipline on display?
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What is the
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, this strange assembly of passionate postures, mute and motley on their numbered black panels? A pictorial history of European art; a map showing the pathways of its recurring figures; an instrument for research; an argument about the development of human culture; a catalogue of types; a collage or montage of emotion. Aby Warburg (1866–1929), the German-Jewish art historian whose last years were devoted to the project, described it more soberly, as ‘an attempt at an art-historical cultural science’, and provided an almost parodically formal description: ‘An Image Series for the Investigation of the Function of Pre-formed Ancient Expressive Values in the Representation of Animated Life in European Renaissance Art’. But these academic claims coexisted with richer, stranger articulations. He named his atlas of images for Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses and the patron of memory, suggesting that it was b
Edmund de Waal s Library of Exile installation was open to the public at the British Museum until very recently. Photo: AFP
One of the victims of the occupation of Iraq s second largest city by the Islamic state for three years, the library of the University of Mosul, renowned throughout the Middle East, lost almost all of its documentary holdings in the chaos of the war.
Which is why British artist and author Edmund de Waal will soon donate 2,000 books from his library of exile to the Iraqi establishment. These works were written by nearly 1,500 authors who have experienced exile over the centuries, such as Voltaire, Samar Yazbek, Ai Qing, Czeslaw Milosz but also Edmund de Waal s grandmother, Elizabeth.