MAGAZINE
The Impossibility of the Panorama: Image, Memory, and the Atlas in Space
As the exhibition “Panorama: The Sphere of the Atlas” is currently on view at the Bat Yam Museum of Art, we spoke with its curator, Orit Bulgaru (Ph.D), an independent curator and researcher of visual culture, about the ideas behind the project. In the interview, we touch on how images travel across time and cultures, how theory becomes a physical exhibition, and how contemporary artists engage with history, memory, and mythology today.
Orit, the exhibition grew out of your long-term research on Aby Warburg and your book Two Panoramas. How did this body of research evolve into an exhibition, and how did you translate these ideas into a space the viewer can move through?
As a matter of fact, this research — like Warburg’s concept of the “surviving image” — has unfolded over roughly two decades in various forms.
The research for my book Two Panoramas began with an artistic project based on photography that I undertook as an undergraduate art student. It sparked my interest in systems of images and in the relationships between them; from there, my doctoral thesis emerged, focusing on Gerhard Richter’s Atlas and tourism. The subsequent book further developed the study of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, which eventually led to the exhibition.
The movement from one image to another is like a sequence of mirrors, whose unifying logic is grounded in expansive historical knowledge while also calling for open-minded thinking. It creates a space for thought (Denkraum, in Warburg’s terms), inviting a kind of wandering within the visual collective memory of our culture.
Aby Warburg is a major figure in the study of visual culture, but he is not widely known in Israel. What was important for you to reveal here about his thinking and its relevance today?
Aby Warburg’s study of Renaissance art sought to trace the impulses and passions that shape the visual memory of Western culture — not only those rooted in Greece and Rome, but also those emerging from the ancient Eastern world: the MENA region, including Egypt, Jerusalem, Babylon, Persia, and Assyria, alongside the demonic and irrational forces that traverse it. In dialogue with Nietzsche, Warburg identifies two formative poles of Western culture: Athens and Alexandria.
How did you translate these ideas into the exhibition?
At the entrance to the exhibition, Panel A presents a map on which Warburg marked the sites through which astrological knowledge circulated. This cartographic gesture frames the exhibition’s central inquiry into the transmission of images across geographies and temporalities.
Encountering Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas in Europe, where the visual environment often echoes its internal language, is one context. Its presentation here, however, produces a different set of resonances. Accordingly, the selected panels foreground processes of cultural transmission, bringing into view manuscripts and archaeological objects that attest to the central role of the Middle East in the dissemination of visual knowledge.
Several panels juxtapose Arabic and Eastern manuscripts with Western materials, tracing a bidirectional movement of astrological and iconographic forms. This trajectory maps a cultural passage from East to West — Baghdad, Toledo, Padua, Rimini, Ferrara — while also revealing the persistence of earlier visual strata. Pagan and feral deities, as well as proto-astrological figures associated with divination and prediction, re-emerge in the calendars and related materials of Christian Europe, mediated through Arabic and Eastern sources.
The formation of astrological knowledge itself exemplifies this longue durée of image survival and intercultural exchange. Originating in the Mesopotamian region in the third millennium BCE, and shaped by Babylonian, Egyptian, and related traditions, astrology assumed its classical form in the late Hellenistic period and continued to be transmitted across cultures thereafter.
The exhibition presents Warburg’s panels as a starting point for contemporary works. How did you select the artists, and what affinities or themes were you looking for in their practices?
I selected artists whose affinity with the themes emerging from Warburg is intrinsic to their practice: artists who engage with the visual memory of the present and its grounding in the past, and those who work with historical and astrological mythologies, exploring the tension between the rational and the irrational through imagery and the anxieties that shape human experience.
Questions of archaeology, the tension between nature and culture, and the persistence of material traces are central to the works of Deganit Berest, Assaf Evron, and Hinda Weiss. An engagement with cross-cultural exchange defines the practices of Elham Rokni and Karam Natour. The resonance of mythology, and the capacity of images to act upon and transform the world, is evident in the works of Carolina Lehan, Netaly Eylon, and Uri Zamir.
One of the central ideas in the exhibition is the “surviving image” — an image that migrates across time and cultures. How do you understand this idea today?
What I find compelling in Warburg’s notion of the “surviving image” is that the image wanders, transforms, and accumulates meaning and energy over time, as the past remains continually present.
How does this idea take shape in the works presented in the exhibition?
Hinda Weiss’s Among Graves and Ruins (2019) was filmed in and around the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, originally established during the British Mandate as the Archaeological Museum of Palestine. Using video collage, Weiss constructs a panoramic reconstruction of a walk along the seam line between West and East Jerusalem, moving through historically, religiously, and politically charged sites—from the Valley of Josaphat and the Mount of Olives cemetery to Silwan. The camera lingers on details, bringing archaeological traces into dialogue with the present. Around the graves, the sacred and the everyday intermingle: worshippers, tourists, and children at play, as the muezzin’s call to prayer cuts through a soccer game. The work evokes a daily reality unfolding within a landscape layered with graves and ruins.
Assaf Evron’s works likewise engage this notion. His installation presents a table of photographs of archaeological and geological sites. Moving between locations such as Lot’s Wife, Beit El, and the “Temple of the Leopards,” Evron constructs a meandering, non-linear conception of history. Another work of Evron is Bone Game (2025) is a sculptural installation composed of bone casts based on an ancient Greek letter oracle used for divination. Each letter corresponds to a prophetic message, with the first word of each prophecy beginning with that letter. The system draws on practices involving knucklebones (astragaloi)—small bones cast like dice to determine fate. These objects are precursors to modern dice and to games such as “five stones,” tracing a cultural trajectory from Egypt to Greece and Rome, and across Europe and Asia, where they persist in various forms today.
The exhibition is presented in the circular space of the Bat Yam Museum. How did this architecture shape the way you built the exhibition?
When I began thinking about the exhibition and how to translate the concept of the panorama into space, it became clear to me that it should take place in the circular architecture of the Bat Yam Museum. I know the space well, and I was interested in translating the idea of the panorama, as developed in my book Two Panoramas, into a physical environment.
As one moves through the exhibition, the Mnemosyne Atlas panels are presented along the circular wall of the museum. They are immediately recognizable by their black backgrounds and floating images. Around them, contemporary artworks resonate with their meanings and forms, like a kaleidoscope that breaks a unified view into fragments.
What kind of experience does this spatial structure create for the viewer?
On the surface, the panorama — like the atlas — functions as an image container that aggregates and provides an overview, creating the illusion of an ordered system of knowledge and a sense of certainty.
Yet the pursuit of a total and comprehensive vision is inherently bound to fail. The impossibility of the panorama, presented in the exhibition alongside the desire to grasp it, becomes an ethical and political position rooted in Warburg’s history, geography, and biography, shaped by the experience of two world wars. This position also resonates with the rupture we are living through here, now.
The exhibition “Panorama: The Sphere of the Atlas” is open until May 30 at the Bat Yam Museum of Art.
Curator: Orit Bulgaru (Ph.D)
Photography: Daniel Hanoch
