Religious Worldbuilding in Contemporary Art

Feminist Religious Worldbuilding in Contemporary Art

In the context of renewed interest in ritual forms, origin myths and the artist as mystic/ priestess/ shamaness, this lecture will explore how contemporary artists are adopting and adapting devotional cultures (including indigenous and pagan/ folk forms alongside world religions) to create inclusive experiences. Rituals are reperformed, origin stories are reworked, mysticism is recontextualised and religious communities are recreated, producing decolonial, feminist, queer and ecologically-oriented worlds.

We will consider the work of artists (Grace Ndiritu, Holly Slingsby, Zadie Xa and Michael Dudeck among others) deploying performance, experimental writing, installation, textiles, painting and participatory practices toward a mystical and ecological re-enchantment. These artists work against Western ideas of ‘nature’ as beyond the human, instead seeing human bodies as porous, as an entanglement of nature-cultures, immersed in weather-bodies and river-bodies, as the human driven impacts of climate change are felt across all kinds and scales of being. The works perform a feminist new materialist inversion of the binary of woman-nature/ man-culture, and foreground that we are all ecologically interdependent body-worlds.

At stake in these practices are a number of questions: can religious belief and practice be reappraised and newly mobilised toward a politics of inclusion? Can we speak of a ‘religious turn’ in contemporary art? What is the status of truth and fiction within such practices? In a time of culture wars between the forces for tradition and the need for progression and change, what might it mean to reshape religious tradition through artistic practice? Against the perceived secularisation of culture in Europe and North America, and in a time of culture wars and far right ascendency, this lecture will consider the changing relationship between religious culture and contemporary art and how the inclusive politics of these practices speak to the plurality of feminist and queer experience.

We are committed to making our sessions as accessible as possible. If you are unable to pay the full amount for this class, please reach out to us via email at [email protected] and we will provide you with a discount code.