The International Panorama Council (IPC ) is the international organization of panorama specialists committed to supporting the heritage and conservation of the few existing panoramas dating from the 19th and early 20th century, and to sharing knowledge and awareness of the panorama as a medium, including its current relevance and development. We promote professional trusteeship and stimulate worldwide research and conversation on panoramas, historic and modern. IPC’s interests extend to the wider panorama phenomenon including nineteenth-century derivatives of the panorama such as the moving panorama and the diorama as well as contemporary art forms that are closely related, including as photography, film, video, and virtual reality. We are also active in the fields of restoration, research, financing, exhibiting and marketing of panoramas.
The word “panorama” is common in modern language. However, the term was originally coined in the 18th century for an extraordinary visual spectacle. A panorama (or a cyclorama as it is called in some parts of the world) is a purpose-built structure that contains a large 360-degree painting, creating an illusion of standing in the middle of a place and/or event. Natural lighting from a seemingly invisible source adds to the virtual experience. Through its efforts, the International Panorama Council strives to connect the past, present and future of the panorama phenomenon worldwide.
The International Panorama Council is a non-governmental and not-for-profit association subject to Swiss law.
“Memory of the World” (Project 2023 – 2026)Daniel Jaquet
The IPC pursues the valorization of the painted panorama’s heritage as part of its mission and purpose1. The organisation regroups heritage panorama owners or custodians worldwide and therefore is entitled to apply for the recognition of the panoramas as a documentary heritage by the UNESCO programme Memor y of the World2 .
The MoW Programme was established in 1992 with the aim of facilitating the preservation of the world’s past, present and future documentary heritage, assisting universal access to documentary heritage, and increasing awareness worldwide of the existence and significance
of documentary heritage and thereby foster dialogue and mutual understanding between people and cultures.
The application preparation is a bottom-up process which takes time, commitment, and resources. A project for the application has been presented at the IPC General Assembly in 2023, which named a commission to steer the project.
2023 Presentation of the project
2024 IPC member and non-member survey
2024 IPC conference with scientific exchange on the topic
2024 Constitution of national groups based on eligibility criteria
2025 Preparation of national applications
2026 Submission of the application
The operational committee of this IPC commission is composed by Prof. Sarah Kenderdine (Laboratory for Experimental Museology, EPFL), Dominique Hanson (IPC Treasurer, former Director of the Army Museum of Brussels), and Dr. Daniel Jaquet (Laboratory for Experimental Museology, EPFL and Council member of the Foundation for the Panorama of the Battle of Murten)
Updates based on the annual reports presented at the IPC General Assemblies will be published on this page (next: October 2024).
German premiere for Yadegar Asisi’s panorama The Cathedral of Monet— Freedom of Painting: With this work, Yadegar Asisi has created a 360° painting of colour and light in the style of Impressionism. He thus dedicates himself to one of the most important art epochs of our time and provides an insight into his own 30-year period of
painterly creativity. The panorama has been on display at the Panometer in Leipzig since 16 March 2024.
Yadegar Asisi is breaking new artistic ground: for the first time, a panorama has been painted entirely in oil on canvas before being digitally enlarged and printed on fabric. The work, which was then staged on a 3,500 square metre scale, takes us back to the end of the 19th century in the northern French city of Rouen. From several levels of the 15-metre-high visitor tower, visitors are immersed in an experience of vivid brushstrokes and a unique interplay of colour and light.
The scenery opens up as if you were standing on Rouen’s cathedral square in 1894: the evening sun almost completely illuminates the façade of Notre-Dame de Rouen Cathedral in the centre, casting a warm orange-red light on the forecourt and the houses already in the shade. A multifaceted interplay of extraordinary colour nuances, shades and incidences of light pervades the entire surroundings. Asisi immortalises famous painters and contemporaries such as Vincent van Gogh, Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet on the forecourt of the cathedral.
Attention International Panorama Council 2024 conference attendees: The exhibition Thalassa, Thalassa! The Imagery of the Sea will be on view at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts Lausanne, from October 4, 2024 – January 12, 2025. The opening
reception is scheduled for October 3, 2024, 6:00 PM, aligning with the IPC conference in Lausanne, October 2 – 4, 2024. The exhibition will include a major work, The Baden Baden Satellite Reef from the Crochet Coral Reef project by Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim.
This vast immersive wooly environment is what the sisters call “the Sistine Chapel
crochet reefs” and is the largest of more than 50 community-made crochet reefs that have been created around the world. Comprising over 40,000 coral pieces by 4,000 contributors across the German speaking world, the Baden Baden Satellite Reef was produced in conjunction with a project retrospective at Museum Frieder Burda.
“At once a monumental work of feminine fiber art and a mathematically generated synthetic ecology,” the Crochet Reef endeavor marshals citizen-creativity to produce astonishing visual, conceptual and panoramic seascapes out of yarn and other fibers. This will be a special treat for IPC conference attendees while in Lausanne.
I recently attended the Artists Reception for Sanford Wurmfeld’s Corona Variations at the David Richard Gallery in New York. This solo exhibition presented 25 canvases conceived and painted during the pandemic from 2020 to 2023.
The current exhibition consists of works using the grids and color variations for which the artist is known, with this new series dividing the composition into halves, vertically or horizontally. The way in which squares of color are placed draws the eye of the viewer along, almost giving the illusion that the painting’s surface is in motion.
The gallery’s press release describes the largest of these new works as a “panoramic full spectrum centerpiece … measuring 72 ⨉ 144 inches.” Although described as “panoramic,” it is not a circular painting. But Wurmfeld has painted circular and elliptical “cycloramas” in the past. The catalog for his Cyclorama 2000 at the Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh in 2004 contains an essay in which Wurmfeld describes the inspiration for his first abstract panorama: a visit to the Panorama Mesdag in The Hague.
I experienced the artist’s E-Cyclorama years ago: an amazing experience, for the spectator is surrounded by color, with some rows appearing to rotate quickly, others more slowly. At the reception, I was able to speak to Sandy for a few moments, reminding him of my name and IPC membership, and conveying the greetings of Gabriele Koller as well, who wished that she could have been present.
Sandy told me that he has drawn up plans for another cyclorama that he hopes to paint; it would be his fourth such work. Hopefully we will hear more of this in a future issue of the IPC newsletter.
For information on the current exhibition, Corona Variations, see David Eichholtz’s article3. Images of Wurmfeld’s cycloramas can be seen at https://www.sanfordwurmfeld.com
The exhibition Panorama of Congo: Unrolling the Past with Virtual Reality opened on February 24 at the National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon. This exhibition stems from the research project CONGO VR (FilmEU RIT ) coordinated by Victor Flores (Lusófona University) and Leen Engelen (LUCA School of Arts) and focused on the 1913 Panorama of Congo by Alfred Bastien and Paul Mathieu, currently owned by the War Heritage Institute in Belgium.
The exhibition begins by immersing the visitor in a Congolese forest of shadows that will lead them to an installation with a photographic reproduction of the Panorama of Congo and a disquieting soundscape that questions the propagandistic nature of this image. Secondly, the exhibition offers a reinterpretation of this monumental painting (1610 m2) through two Virtual Reality experiences. The first experience recalls the historical context of this colonial propaganda and the preservation issues of such colonial heritage. The second experience showcases artistic interventions in the Panorama by the Congolese artists Deogracias Kihalu, Castélie Yalombo, Eléonor Hellio and Michel Ekeba (Kongo Astronauts), Hadassa Ngamba and Lukah Katangila. The visit concludes with a screening of a short documentary film by Érica Faleiro Rodrigues on the decolonial issues raised by this research project. The exhibition will be on show in Lisbon until 16 June 2024.
The CONGO VR project has been presented at the IPC Conference from its outset (Luxembourg, 2022; Iowa, 2023) and has benefitted from the valuable expertise and suggestions provided by its members. Such interaction and knowledge transfer will also be the goal of the upcoming FilmEU DOCTUS seminar (Lusófona University, March
21–22) where some Panorama researchers, such as Gabriele Koller, as well as artists such as Yadegar Asisi and Christl Lidl will present their work to the PhD students of eight European high education institutions. This seminar, titled ‘Media Arts: Back & Forth’, also includes a guided tour of the Panorama of Congo exhibition.
In Innsbruck, Austria, the Tirol panorama painting of the 1809 Begisel battle was separated from its original rotunda in 2010 (under protest from IPC and preservationists). The Tirol panorama reopened in its new location on Bergisel hill overlooking the city in 2011. Although proposals for the reuse of the rotunda were collected at that time, progress stalled and the rotunda remained empty for a decade.
Links
At the end of last December, the State of Tirol finally approached the city of Innsbruck in order to gift the rotunda to the city. Without clarifying the financial impact of such a transfer in ownership, the city did not accept the gift—yet. After Innsbruck’s municipal elections in April 2024, it is likely that the involved parties come to a positive agreement about the rotunda’s future use.
1 https://panoramacouncil.org/en/who_we_are/organization_overview/ mission_and_purpose/
2 https://www.unesco.org/en/memory-world
3 https://www.blogdavidrichardgallery.com/post/sanford-wurmfeld-debuts-corona-variations-new-compositions-and-palettes-in-newest-series-of-paint