02 ARTISTS AND PANORAMA
It is no coincidence that Yadegar Asisi feels a connection to Dresden. During his parent’s flight from Iran to the former GDR, the architect was born in 1955 in Vienna. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Dresden in the 1970s. The city of Dresden, destroyed by war, was still undergoing reconstruction.
Asisi’s right of residence in the former GDR ended with the completion of his studies. He went to Berlin to the western part of the city, where he still lives and works today. There he completed a further course of study at the Berlin University of Arts and devoted himself to artistic designs of illusion spaces. Asisi came across panoramic art which had its heyday in 19th century and then fell into oblivion. Robert Barker, an Irish painter, who lived and worked in England, is considered the founder of panoramic art. In 1787, he patented a process with which he could produce and present a 360-degree view of a landscape or a city view, as a technical invention. Yadegar Asisi has brought this process back with the possibilities of photography and digital composing.