Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Comparative analysis between Aby Warburg's curatorial approach for his 1930 'Cosmologicon' at the Hamburg Planetary and three 2025 art-science exhibitions on cosmology in The Netherlands. Contributes to building improved theorization of contemporary art-science curatorial practice.

Paper long abstract

In his decolonial cornerstone of a film Perfumed Nightmare (1977) Kidlat Tahimik showcases a particular affection for bridges: the single bridge in his Filipine hometown of Balian, the 26 bridges of Paris, and, most of all, the bridge Wernher von Braun built between the Cape Canaveral and the moon.

After an American brings Kidlat to Paris, the city’s destructive expansion drift as symbolized by the construction site of a supermarket in the old city centre, kills his affection for Western imaginations of progress (“liberté, egalité, fraternité, supermarché!”).

The credits reveal that the pictured construction site actually had been the bare skeleton of the Centre Pompidou all along, awaiting the instalment of her UFO-like chimneys.

Tahimik’s deceit feels appropriate: museums have been and continue to be powerful and intricately designed apparatuses bridging our imagination and the cosmos.

In my presentation, I will re-explore my doctoral research on Dutch science museums by probing their constructions of the cosmological. To do so, I will revisit Aby Warburg’s ‘iconomaniac[al]’ vision for a 1930s exhibition at the astronomy centre in Hamburg, a ‘cosmologicon’ where imageries of astral symbolism and astronomy meet in circular 'denkraum' [‘think-space’], designed to 'avert the tragedy of the tension between instinctive magic and analytical logic'.

Revisiting a number of research sites (Space Expo, Teylers Museum, Sonnenborgh Observatory and Old Observatory Leiden), I analyse: what constitutes their 'denkraum', when new curatorial practices (contemporary art, decolonial narratives) arise in these historical sites of public engagement with science?