2015
2 February 2015 - Investigating the shadows: Talk by Anna Freeman Bentley
Anna Freeman Bentley is a London-based artist whose painting and site specific work employs images of architectural environments that explore the emotive potential of space and its associations with longing and memory. Her practice engages with the built environment, exploring how cities decline and regenerate while raising questions about change and transformation, aspiration and desire, buildings and people, matter and spirit. Following a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, in 2010 she graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. She has had solo exhibitions in Berlin, Venice and California, residencies in London with the Florence Trust and with the Michelin-starred restaurant Pied a Terre, and participated in group exhibitions including the Prague Biennale 2011, the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2009 and the inaugural East London Painting Prize 2014. In February 2015, her first monograph will be published by Anomie Publishing, featuring newly commissioned essays by Michele Robecchi, Ben Quash, and Marina Cashdan.
2014
31 January, 28 February and 28 March 2014 - Music and Theology Colloquia
The public making of music in our society happens more often in the context of chapels, churches and cathedrals than anywhere else. The command to sing and make music to God makes music an essential part of the DNA of Christian worship.
This series of colloquia hosted jointly by the Westminster Abbey Institute and the Centre for Arts and the Sacred at King’s College London (ASK) will foster a high-quality interdisciplinary conversation between music and Christian ideas, drawing in the expertise of musical practitioners, musical theorists, and theologians. Each colloquium will run over a whole day with papers from two speakers and plenty of opportunity for discussion. The sessions will ask questions about the content, the contexts, and the performance of music.
Revolutions in how music is understood, composed and performed have paralleled revolutions in the way we think about the universe and our very place in it. Once, as Daniel Chua argues, music was thought of as like a taut string connecting earth and heaven; now music has ‘tumbled from the stars’. Yet, as arguably the most abstract, philosophical and emotionally-affecting art form there is, it remains a source of fascination and one to which religious language is still often applied.
Is music above meaning and morality? Are some pieces of music more sacred, or spiritual, than others? Did something go terribly wrong in our culture when we started to let ideas of ‘high art’ affect the way we valued participatory, community-based performance – and thus forgot something about what music in worship is meant to serve?
All of these questions are of daily relevance to the Church as well as to many in wider society.
7 - 11 July 2014 - The Sacred City: London, art and the religious imaginary
William Blake famously hoped to see “Jerusalem builded here” in London. But he was hardly the first or the last creative mind to imagine a new metropolis. In the days after the Great Fire of 1666, Christopher Wren, the great architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral, drafted a bold, utopian design for the City of London that was never realized. The performance of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is an annual London tradition which began in the composer’s lifetime. For the novelist Emmanuel Litvinoff, the East London of the late 19th and early 20th Century, all but obliterated during the Blitz, was both a grimy a Jewish ghetto and a Garden of Eden. In the Lonely Londoners, Sam Selvon gave us the figure of Moses, the leader of a ragtag group of Caribbean immigrants making their way in 1950s London. More recently, the young British artist Mark Wallinger filmed himself reciting backwards the opening lines of the Gospel of John on the escalator of the Angel tube station. These are only a few of the various ways in which London has been both the site and subject of the religious imaginary. In this conference, we invite participants to explore the unique intersections between art and religion in a city which has increasingly become not only a new Jerusalem but also another Mecca, Benares and Amritsar.
Keynote speakers include Sam Wells, Rector of St Martins-in-the-Fields, and Alison Milbank, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham.
3 April 2014 - Riding the Tide: A Life of Faith in the World of Fashion
An evening to share the journey behind a new book celebrating 15 favourite Psalms, with writer, singer and senior fashion industry executive Simon Ward.
9 April 2014 - Why do so many Jewish artists like creating works for churches?
Lecture by Dr Aaron Rosen at the Art and Sacred Places Annual General Meeting. Dr Rosen will survey some of the most intriguing Jewish church commissions, including those by Lipchitz, Chagall, Epstein, Rothko and Nevelson.
10 February 2014 - 3rd Curator Roundtable, Discussion of the Jameel Prize Exhibition @ the V&A
20 March 2014 - 2nd ACE-KCL Artists' Talk, James Hugonin on Art and the Sacred
2013
11 November 2013 - Friday Saturday Sunday: The Future of Multi-Faith Space
A presentation and conversation about a proposal for a unique building: a single enclosure containing a church, synagogue and mosque. Could such a building be built? Where? How? What are the key questions– theological, social, and aesthetic – which the project raises? Religion is difficult and complex - but just as there is a history of conflict between faiths, there is also a greater history of tolerance and coexistence.
19 November 2013 - David Lewis, Collector’s Talk
We welcome David Lewis, whose family have assembled what is one of the most exceptional private collections of Old Master paintings anywhere in the world: the Schorr Collection. The full catalogue is due to be published in January 2014. David Lewis agreed to come and give us a rare insight into this collection, by talking about a select group of the religious paintings that especially interest him: the images of St Jerome.
26 November 2013 - Susie Hamilton, Artist’s Talk
Susie Hamilton is a highly acclaimed figurative painter represented by the Paul Stolper Gallery whose work is in the Methodist Art Collection as well those of Deutsche Bank and Bernard Jacobson. In her talk, she will relate her work to ideas of nature, art and God.An event hosted by Art & Christianity Enquiry (ACE) and the Centre for Arts and the Sacred at King’s (ASK)St Mary-le-Strand, opposite the front entrance of King’s College London’s Strand Campus, by kind permission of the Churchwardens.
28 November 2013 - Marilynne Robinson and Francis Spufford Co-hosted with Theos
A special seminar with the acclaimed North American novelist Marilynne Robinson (author, among other things, of Gilead) and the British writer Francis Spufford (author, among other things, of the fiery recent defence of Christianity Unapologetic).
17 April 2013 - 1st Curator Roundtable: Light Show at the Hayward Gallery
22 April 2013 - Workshop on Interfaith Architecture
28 May 2013 - Hosted meeting of the London Jewish Artists Salon
13 June 2013 - Blue Like Me: The Art of Siona Benjamin