Honorary Membership for Yadegar Asisi

At the 31^st International Panorama Council Conference which was hosted by the Lëtzebuerg City Museum in Luxembourg from 13 to 16 September 2022, the General Assembly of the International Panorama Council decided to award the IPC honorary membership to panorama artist Yadegar Asisi to honour his general support and merit, to the world-wide panorama community and in particular to disseminate the panorama as an art form for the 21^st century audience.

On 6 November 2022, an IPC delegation travelled to Berlin, Germany, to visit and honour the artist and to present the IPC honorary membership certificate to him. IPC vice-president Gabriele Koller, IPC treasurer Dominique Hanson, and IPC advisory board member Patrick Deicher were warmly welcomed by Yadegar Asisi on Berlin’s Museum Island where the group was given a guided tour by the artist to his impressive new Pergamon Panorama and the accompanying exhibition. The gigantic 30-metre-high 360-degree panorama shows the hustle and bustle of the ancient city of Pergamon in 129 AD with the world-famous Pergamon Altar (today the central exhibit of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum) depicted in the centre. The Pergamon Panorama is a new version of Asisi’s first Pergamon Panorama of 2011/12, but differs from it in many aspects. A theatrical simulation of the changing light conditions of day and night and a sound composition created specifically for the image heightens its impressive effect – a typical feature of many Asisi panoramas.

Asisi who lives and works in Berlin, started his career as a panorama artist around 30 years ago when he worked as an exhibition designer for Sehsucht (“desire to see”) dedicated to the history of the panorama and shown in the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Germany, for which he also reconstructed a late-nineteenth century panorama. Since that time he has created 17 modern 360-degree panoramas. Asisi’s most recent panorama, New York 9/11, is on show in Leipzig, Germany, since April 2022.

To the International Panorama Council which was founded in 1992, at the same time Yadegar Asisi started his career as a panorama artist, the panoramas created by Asisi are powerful new examples of the panoramic art form proving the continuation of its magic into the present time.

Yadegar Asisi has been involved with the IPC for long, as a former member of the executive board of IPC and as contributor to several International Panorama Council conferences in the past. In 2008 he hosted the 17^th International Panorama Council conference in the Dresden Panometer, a historic gasometer which serves as an exhibition space for Asisi’s panoramas.

For more information on the artist and his work, see www.asisi.de

See also IPC’s publications More than Meets the Eye: The Magic of the Panorama (2019) with contributions by Yadegar Asisi on drawing and by Stephan Oettermann on Asisi’s Pergamon Panorama, and The Panorama in the Old World and the New (2010) which includes Yadegar Asisi’s contribution ‘The Rebirth of the Panorama’.