Pergamon Museum

Viewing gallery at the Pergamonmuseum Panorama in Berlin

The Pergamonmuseum Panorama in Berlin presents a contemporary reimagining of the panoramic form, reviving a nineteenth-century medium once synonymous with immersion, spectacle, and a desire to confront distant or inaccessible worlds. Conceived by Yadegar Asisi, the installation stages a monumental 360-degree reconstruction of the ancient city of Pergamon, enveloping visitors in a total field of vision. Like its nineteenth-century antecedents, the Panorama does not simply depict a remembered space, but orchestrates a perceptual event—one in which scale, atmosphere, and embodied spectatorship converge to explore the act of looking. This panorama is one of the largest examples of this type of spectacle in the world. 

This panorama relates closely to Arctic panoramas of the nineteenth century, such as those exhibited in London and New York following Franklin’s expeditions, which offered audiences a mediated encounter with the sublime polar environment, or Robert Burford’s Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions (1850), based on William Henry Browne’s expedition drawings, staged a "didactic yet thrilling theatre of the sublime"(O’Dochartaigh, 2022). These vast painted panoramas presented the ice-bound landscape as a theatre of both desolation and wonder, crafting an illusion of presence for viewers who would never set foot in the Arctic. Their power rested not only on mimetic detail, but on the phenomenological impact of immersion: the disorientation of scale, the atmospheric evocation of light and fog, and the bodily sensation of being surrounded by an environment on all sides. 

Placed in dialogue with these earlier Arctic spectacles, the Pergamon museum panorama underscores how panoramic technologies persist as mediators between material reality and its simulation. Both historical and contemporary examples interrogate the (in)adequacy of representation—whether paint or pixels—and reveal how technologically constructed environments can at times deepen, rather than diminish, embodied experience. For my research, the panorama underscores how sculptural devices like the Vitrine function as mediating environments, generating new knowledge by reshaping how presence, perception, and materiality are experienced. 

Gordon, at the viewing gallery at the Pergamonmuseum Panorama in Berlin

Visitors at the Pergamonmuseum Panorama in Berlin

Synchronised light projectors at the Pergamonmuseum Panorama in Berlin

Distortions revealed by photographing hte panorama from below

O’Dochartaigh, E. (2022) ‘“Never to Be Forgotten”: Presenting the Arctic Panorama (1850)’, in Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press & Assessment