Memory & Migration: The Warburg Institute 1926 - 2024

Tuesday to Saturday, 12.00 noon to 6.00pm

To mark the completion of the Warburg Renaissance project and the opening of the Institute’s new gallery space, Memory & Migration presents a selection of objects from the collection that explore its interwoven histories of movement and survival. 

The Institute’s intellectual mission was established by its founder Aby Warburg (1866-1929), whose boundless enquiry sought to understand the formation and trace the afterlives of images through time and space. Where the art histories of his time had focussed on form, style and attribution, Warburg’s work pursued connections: examining how images emerge, travel, evolve and transform their meanings across disciplines. Warburg’s final and unfinished project, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, is a visual elegy to the collective memory of Western cultural history. A vast, apparently associative image-map, it was incomplete at the time of Warburg’s death. Comprised of a collection of fragments, the Bilderatlas offered a new and profoundly imaginative critical space for successive generations of scholars and artists to trace the relationships between the mind, images and society.  

Accompanying Warburg’s search for new intellectual territory is the story of the survival and expansion of the Institute itself. Initially assembled from Aby Warburg’s personal library, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg [KBW] was founded in 1900 at Warburg's home in Hamburg. Institutionalised by Fritz Saxl, a purpose-built library opened in the adjacent plot in 1926, three years before Warburg’s death. Just seven years later, the Warburg’s staff and collections arrived in London in 1933 as exiles from Nazi Germany. After more than two decades in temporary sites in Millbank and later the Imperial Institute, the Institute, incorporated into the University of London in 1944, was given its current home designed by the architect Charles Holden in 1958. 

In 2022, the architectural firm Haworth Tompkins led the redesign of the building to include a number of new public venues for exhibitions and events. During the two-year project, photographer in residence Tereza Červeňová documented the building’s changes. A selection of these images is included in the launch display, alongside a reconstructed panel from Warburg’s Bilderatlas, making visible the Institute’s process of transformation and renewal.

Today, the Warburg’s collections have grown into one of the world’s most original and uniquely arranged libraries and image collections of cultural history - linking the textual and the visual, the intellectual and the social, the scientific and the magical. The completion of the Warburg’s Renaissance redevelopment means that for the first time in its 66 years in Bloomsbury, the Institute will have spaces where its collections, research and artistic communities can coalesce and be presented to the public. Memory & Migration presents a selection of moments from these connected pasts, narrated by artists, writers and cultural historians drawn from the Warburg’s community of readers and researchers. 

At the request of Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne, the Greek Goddess of memory, was carved above the entrance to the Institute’s first purpose-built home in Hamburg, and at the request of his former collaborator and then director Gertrud Bing a new version in Woburn Square. Today, it sits above the entrance to the gallery and reading room, its meaning the same: that all visitors who enter the Warburg pass under the spell of Mnemosyne and her children, the nine muses of the arts and sciences.

EXHIBITION ATTENDANCE FREE. NO BOOKING REQUIRED.

image: Tereza Červeňová, Photo Collection Decant, The Warburg Institute, First Floor, 27 April 2022

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