25/06/2022
An Ancient Pergamon Lover!
The exhibition titled "Pergamon Museum Das Panorama" by artist Yadegar Asisi, who prepares the world's largest panoramic exhibitions, offers a three-dimensional journey to ancient Pergamon.
Kerem Saltuk, Berlin
A modern cylindrical building rises directly opposite the Museum Island (Museuminsel), which is on the World Cultural Heritage list of Berlin. In this building, which looks like a large grain silo from afar, the world's largest picture of Pergamon, with a height of 30 meters and a length of 104 meters, is displayed panoramically in 360 degrees. Architect-artist Yadegar Azizi, who visited the Pergamon Museum, which houses the Zeus Altar, which was bought with money and torn from the Aegean with the permission of the Ottoman Empire, as a child, and was fascinated by this beauty, worked for years to create the image of ancient Pergamon in his dreams. He came to Bergama many times and made drawings. In order to reenact life at that time, animations were performed with actors at film studios in Berlin and tens of thousands of photographs were taken. These photographs were blended with the pictures drawn by Azizi in a computer environment and turned into a high resolution picture. The cylinder was printed on a 3100 square meter polyester surface with a special technology to cover the entire interior wall of the exhibition hall.
“I like Izmir so much!”
Yadigar Azizi, who continues his work in Berlin and has traveled to Izmir many times for the preliminary preparations of his exhibitions, said, “I was very impressed by the historical and cultural richness of Izmir. It has a dynamic, energetic, large youth audience. I like Izmir very much,” said the artist, who was born in Vienna in 1955 as the son of an Iranian Azerbaijani immigrant family.
While studying architecture at the University of Dresden in Germany in the 1970s, his interest in the history of Bergama increased. While working as a professor at a university in Berlin, he decided to organize a huge panoramic exhibition on the history of Pergamon, and after years of effort, he did so. “I wanted to show the daily life of the community in Bergama. The historical artifacts filled in museums cannot show this life,” says the artist, while preparing his projects, he conducts long and detailed research together with scientists and archaeologists.
“Museums should be from life!”
Stating that many people do not read the writings placed next to the artifacts in museums, and that they look and choose without feeling the historical or artistic artifacts on display, Azizi explains that he aims to portray life in the most natural and real way possible in the panoramic exhibitions he has created. Those who see the Pergamon panorama, prepared like a time tunnel stretching back to Bergama 1900 years ago, include the young people dancing and having fun by the river with special sound and light effects, the shepherds of the village herding goose herds, the people who pray and make vows at the Altar of Zeus, and the young lovers wandering under the olive trees. , musicians playing and singing in the streets, the crowds gathered in the theater, in short, the ancient life of Bergama, with all its liveliness and colours.
