Night Maps
An exhibition at The Warburg Institute, London.
Night Maps is a major exhibition at the Warburg Institute in London, exploring the styles and stakes of mapping the night sky.
Curated by Warburg Professor John Tresch in partnership with The Sunderland Collection, this exhibition traces the entangled histories of cosmic imagination and earthly power.
From medieval courts and cathedrals to moon landings and satellite surveillance, Night Maps 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.
Photography: Stephen White & Co. Courtesy of the Warburg Institute.
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 (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; a 13th-century manuscript by cosmologist William of Conches; a monumental Chinese blue celestial map from 1822; the allegorical ‘Christian Knight’ Map that inspired John Milton’s Paradise Lost; a rare eighteenth-century Nepalese Bhūgola or ‘world diagram’; and an engraved stone cosmogram from the Valdivian culture of Ecuador dating to 2000 BCE.
The exhibition will also include rare globes and documents on loan from Royal Museums Greenwich, and photographs and other materials from the UCL/NASA Regional Planetary Image Facility, as well as material drawn from the Warburg 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 totemic panels from Warburg’s unfinished final work Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, will also be on display in Night Maps.
Woodcut chart of the Northern and Southern skies
Johannes Honter (1541). ©The Sunderland Collection
The exhibition unfolds across four 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.
Programming
- 29 October 2026 – Curator’s roundtable talk with John Tresch, Kristen Lippincott (The Saxl Project) and Joanna Warsza (City Curator of Hamburg)
- 12 November 2026 – Exhibition Tour
- 17 November 2026 – Talk and Book Launch: Working Knowledge: A Simon Schaffer Reader
- 27 November 2026 – Cosmic Maps: A Day of Talks with The Sunderland Collection
- 2 December – Talk – Cosmic House / Isaac Julien in conversation
- January / February 2027 – Royal Museums Greenwich: Stargazing at Queen's House
- February to March 2027 – Short course: Mapping Worlds with Prof. Alessandro Scafi
- 8 April 2027 – WHAT’S YOUR MAP? LIVE podcast at the Warburg Institute
- Ongoing: Exhibition on Warburg and Chinese Astrology at the Institute Archive and online
Visit the Warburg Institute website for more information and registration.
Night Maps is curated by John Tresch - Professor of History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute, along with Matthew Harle - Curator of Artistic Programmes and Phoebe Cripps - Programme Manager & Associate Curator.
The exhibition is generously supported by mapping and location technology specialist TomTom.
Admission is free.
Location: The Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday 11am – 6pm and Saturdays 11am – 5pm
©Warburg Institute
About The Warburg Institute
The Warburg Institute is one of the world’s leading centres for the study of art and culture. Its collections, courses and programmes are dedicated to the study of global cultural history and the role of images in society. Founded in Hamburg at the turn of the twentieth century by historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), the Institute was established to trace the roots of the Renaissance in ancient civilisations and ended up changing the way we see the world around us.
The Warburg Institute owes its mission — and its very existence — to the open movement of people, collections and ideas. The Warburg’s unique Library, Archive and Photographic Collection form a holistic, associative engine for exploring the histories of the arts and sciences — linking the textual and the visual, the intellectual and the social, the scientific and the magical.
Following an extensive renovation of the Institute’s building in Bloomsbury, new spaces for exhibitions and events have restored the Institute’s original emphasis on discovery, display and debate and are bringing its holdings and programmes to new audiences.
Building on Aby Warburg’s belief that the memory of the past activates the present, the Warburg examines the movement of culture across barriers — of time, space and discipline — to inspire, inform and connect.
Find out more at warburg.sas.ac.uk
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