From the Cosmos to the Commons
From the Cosmos to the Commons is a constellation of projects reflecting the human need to look up to the stars in order to understand life on Earth. It examines how we have constructed our orientation and navigation systems both through myths and grids, and how we make sense of them. Exhibitions at the Planetarium Hamburg, Stadtpark and Kunsthaus Hamburg trace the ancient ways in which humans have read the night skies via astrology and astronomy all the way to recent navigation and surveillance technologies.
In the dire state of the world today, we seek to orient ourselves in a planetary way, where both the magical and the rational, the spiritual and the political are necessary for us to thrive and to rethink our relation with our host, the Planet. This series of exhibitions along with the symposium at the Warburg-Haus guide us through new paths of planetary thinking – as an invitation to look at the cosmos in order to reimagine our commons.
Between Stars and Signals
20 June – 17 August 2025
at Kunsthaus Hamburg
The group show at the Kunsthaus Hamburg spans an arc from humanity’s early understanding of the world and its orientation on the stars all the way to the planetary paradigm and modern technologies such as GPS. The participating artists explore the topic of physical movement through space and time along with its philosophical and social implications. The works on view reflect the complex relationships between humans, nature and the cosmos – and make us think. For the question remains whether the digital transformation will lead to a deeper cosmic consciousness or whether it will distance us even further from our immediate experience of the world.
Artists: Aram Bartholl, Zach Blas, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Charles & Ray Eames, Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner, Timo Nasseri, Norbert Pape & Simon Speiser, Trevor Paglen, Katie Paterson, Marie Pietsch, Agnieszka Polska, Jana Schumacher, Hoda Tawakol
Curated by Anna Nowak
Image Collection on the History of Astrology and Astronomy
Aby Warburg in Collaboration with Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl
21 June –24 August 2025
at Planetarium Hamburg
The Planetarium Hamburg hosts a “hidden treasure”: an exhibition on astrology and astronomy designed by Aby Warburg together with his collaborators Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl shortly before his death in 1929. Its contents were long considered lost and were rediscovered among a pile of rubbish only in the late 1980s by Uwe Fleckner. Set out as an elliptical journey, Warburg’s exhibition inquires into how the spiritual and the rational – both essential to human wellbeing – can be brought together and “how mankind down the ages has tried to interpret and explain the stars and their mysterious movements”.
Curated by Uwe Fleckner
From the Cosmos to the Commons
21 June –24 August 2025
at Planetarium Hamburg & Stadtpark
The exhibition at the Stadtpark orbits around Aby Warburg’s ideas, bringing them into our time, into our distressful political reality and into one of the largest and oldest public spaces in Hamburg. The exhibition traces how humans have looked for orientation systems in the world both in astrological and astronomical ways, negotiating necessary tensions between the spiritual and the political, the circular and the compostable, the magical and the rational, the self and the other. Four works situated directly at the Planetarium and twelve scattered around the park guide us through planetary thinking, planetary boundaries and a sense of planetary belonging on an Earth where no one place is more central than any other and no life should be more important than another one.
Artists: Salwa Aleryani, Agnes Denes, María Edwards, Shahira Issa, KITE, Magorzata Mirga-Tas, Timo Nasseri, Ben Nurgenç, Olu Ogunnaike, Sibylle Peters & Felix Jung, Raqs Media Collective, Eske Schlüters, Xul Solar, Hoda Tawakol, Heidi Voet
Curated by Joanna Warsza
Towards the Planetary Public Sphere
22 June 2025
at Warburg-Haus
In a mixture of readings, performances, theory and culinary experiments, the symposium explores how art mediates various meanings underlying the concept of planetarity – in political, scientific and mythological terms. We make our way through the entanglements between a grain of sand, the bacteria in our gut, rare earth minerals inside our phones and the history of Islamic astrology and astronomy. These contributions enable the imagination of planetary publicness as a vista of orientation beyond earthly extraction and exploitation.
With Uwe Fleckner, Shahira Issa, KITE, Raqs Media Collective, Bill Sherman and others
Curated by Joanna Warsza and Patricia Reed
From the Cosmos to the Commons marks the beginning of the five-year programme conceived by City Curator Joanna Warsza. Since 2024, the project City Curator Hamburg has been hosted by Kunsthaus Hamburg.
