Review:

Atlas. How to carry the world on one’s back?

In recent years the notion of the atlas has become a fashionable concept in both critical theory and contemporary art. Artists such Gerhard Richter and Walid Raad have named two of their most important projects after this ancient publishing genre, while the notion emerged as a means of addressing both the epochal archival impulse and the epistemic revolution brought about by hypermedia. Even though the history of this particular form of visual knowledge goes back many centuries the atlas has come to signify a strikingly modern way of producing, exposing, or thinking about images. The exhibition Atlas. How to carry the world on one’s back? addresses one fundamental and often overlooked question: what exactly is an atlas and what are its powers?