From the Cosmos to the Commons marks the beginning of the programme conceived by City Curator Joanna Warsza. Since 2024, the project has been hosted by Kunsthaus Hamburg. Over the next five years, the City Curator holds summer exhibitions revolving around the five elements – Cosmos, Fire, Air, Earth and Water – with the focus on one element each year. In 2025, the programme is dedicated to the Cosmos and will consist of four parts: a recreation of Aby Warburg’s Image Collection on the History of Astrology and Astronomy at the Planetarium Hamburg, curated by Uwe Fleckner, exhibitions of contemporary art at the Stadtpark, curated by Joanna Warsza, and the Kunsthaus Hamburg, curated by Anna Nowak, as well as a Symposium curated by Joanna Warsza and Patricia Reed at the Warburg Haus. The aim of this series is to establish orientation points in a disoriented reality with a view to explore potential planetary public spheres.

On the evening of the summer solstice, we begin with the meta-element of Cosmos at the Planetarium Hamburg, where, for the first time in years, a “hidden treasure” will go on display, namely the exhibition Image Collection on the History of 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 only rediscovered among a pile of rubbish in the late 1980s by Uwe Fleckner, who is curating its re-creation. Set out as an elliptical journey in the contemporary exhibition architecture designed by José Délano, Warburg’s exhibition asks how the spiritual and the rational, both essential to human wellbeing, can be brought together, and considers “how mankind down the ages has tried to interpret and explain the stars and their mysterious movements”.

From the Cosmos to the Commons at the Planetarium Hamburg and throughout its adjacent Stadtpark presents a series of artworks that orbit around the original Warburg exhibition and the topics of astrology and astronomy, such as a field of sunflowers, the ancient goddess Nut who was said to swallow the sun at dusk, an Islamic sundial and the mycelium of the local area, among others. The artworks explore the human need to look into the sky in order to make sense of our place on Earth. They expand on the ideas examined by Warburg, looking at the dire state of the world today, and ask what it means to live in a planetary way, negotiating the spiritual and the political, the circular and the compostable, the magical and the rational. The artists guide us through planetary thinking, planetary boundaries and a sense of planetary belonging on an Earth. This extraordinary constellation of visions and ideas looking at the cosmos asks how do we need to reimagine our commons - the possible planetary public sphere, speaking from Hamburg out into the world and looking for new possible way of inhabiting the planet.