Night Maps
An exhibition with The Warburg Institute, London.
The Sunderland Collection and The Warburg Institute are pleased to announce Night Maps, a major exhibition this autumn exploring the styles and stakes of mapping the night sky, opening on 21 October 2026 and running until 17 April 2027.
Curated by Warburg Professor John Tresch in partnership with The Sunderland Collection, Night Maps traces the entangled histories of cosmic imagination and earthly power. From medieval courts and cathedrals to moon landings and satellite surveillance, the exhibition reveals how depictions of the heavens have been made to serve rival systems on earth – and how these mythical flights continue to shape the worlds we share.
Night Maps explores how maps of the skies have served as both poetic visions and tools of government on land. From Taoist priests and imperial administrators in second-century China who envisioned the skies as a ‘celestial bureaucracy’, to Renaissance astronomers, colonial naval officers, and Cold War cosmonauts, the night sky has been a canvas for the writing and rewriting of power, where myth guides technology, and observation serves earthly ambitions. Inscribed with gods and monsters, data and diagrams, these maps ask: how do structures of control and containment imprint themselves onto the vastness of the night sky?
Chart of the Ptolemaic Solar System from Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius (First edition, second issue, 1660) ©The Sunderland Collection
Highlights of the exhibition, drawn from The Sunderland Collection and on public display for the first time, include the first printed edition of Ptolemy’s Almagest; an illustrated manuscript by 12th-century cosmologist William of Conches; a monumental Chinese blue celestial map from 1822 which updated Chinese astronomy with Western geography; one of seven known examples of the allegorical ‘Christian Knight’ Map which inspired John Milton’s Paradise Lost; a rare eighteenth-century Nepalese Bhūgola or ‘world diagram’ whose contemplation strengthened rulers’ force and virtue; and an engraved stone cosmogram from the ancient Valdivian culture of Ecuador dating to 2000 BCE.
The exhibition will also include slides and photographs from the UCL/NASA Regional Planetary Image Facility (RPIF), on public view for the first time, as well as material drawn from the Institute’s collections.
Aby Warburg’s interest in the long cycles of influence of astrological imagery on art and philosophy led him to curate an exhibition for Hamburg’s Planetarium shortly before his death in 1929. Material relating to this exhibition, as well as three iconic panels from Warburg’s unfinished final work Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, will be on display here in the Warburg Institute's Kythera Gallery.
Woodcut Celestial chart of the Northern and
Southern Hemispheres by Johannes Honter (1541)
The exhibition unfolds across four interconnected sections, tracing how the heavens have been observed, imagined, ordered, and put to work. It opens with ‘Myth and Logic’, which shows the constant interaction between precise astronomical knowledge and mythological projection, where human observers and calculators contend with ancient, personified constellations and the pressure of obscure forces enveloping the earth. ‘Celestial Bureaucracies’ follows, examining how star maps conjure up elaborate systems of terrestrial administration, accounting, and time- and record-keeping on earth. ‘Claiming Space’ explores how celestial knowledge is mobilised in the service of governance, from royal and imperial cosmologies to modern military and corporate space-race cartographies. The exhibition concludes with ‘Satellite States’, in which contemporary maps, digital and video works detail the tight entwinement of space, surveillance and planetary orientation today.
A full public programme, including a live podcast recording of the award-winning What’s Your Map?, a full-day symposium, and talks, events and workshops will accompany the exhibition.
Night Maps is curated by John Tresch, Professor of History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute. The exhibition is generously supported by mapping and location technology specialist TomTom.
Admission is free. More information coming soon.
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