Framing Religious Art in UK Collections

17 June 2025, 13:30-15:30

To book your free ticket, register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/framing-religious-art-in-uk-collections-tickets-1284374902909?aff=oddtdtcreator

Artworks with religious subjects form the foundation of many regional and national collections in the UK. However, Western art histories argue that with the emergence of avant-garde movements at the end of the nineteenth century religious art was relegated and marked as incompatible with the artistic expression of modern life. Underpinned by this dubious narrative, today’s museums and galleries are still filled with the art of a ‘religious past’ but institutional approaches, which often uphold stereotypes or view the art of the Bible through a predominantly Christian lens, lack important contexts for interpreting such works.

In this workshop, artists, curators, and academics will present brief position papers that reflect on the museum as a space for faith and belief, making religious art today, and some possibilities for presenting historical and contemporary religious artworks to audiences who come from diverse faith backgrounds or none at all.

The second half of the session will be a facilitated discussion session focused around 3 questions:

• What is the role of museums and galleries in shaping and sharing multicultural narratives of faith and belief?
• How can historical collections of religious artworks be brought into meaningful dialogue with audiences of diverse faith backgrounds today?
• How can religious artworks enhance museum interpretation, outreach, and institutional missions to be more representative?

Participants are welcome to bring their experiences of the collections they work for or research into the discussion.

Speakers:

Bruno Grad (b.1987, Kent) is an artist based in Margate. His work is concerned with Jewish identity and practice: what it means to be a Jewish artist in the contemporary world. Primarily working with painting and drawing, it explores the possibility of a distinctively religious artistic endeavour within the idiom of contemporary art, conceptually oriented around notions of attention, intentionality, intensification, recursiveness.

His paintings, imbued with the vitality of a lived tradition, offer a space for connection and reflection, inviting viewers to engage with the rich tapestry of Jewish life and identity. For Grad, living with the material of a Jewish life, the visual landscape and atmosphere of Judaism is also a way of being within religion.

Grad received his degree in English Literature from King’s College, University of Cambridge (2009). His most recent exhibitions are People of the Body, 4 Garden Walk Gallery (2024), Standing Ground, Thames-side Studios Gallery (2024). Grad was selected for the inaugaral Jewish Renaissance Artist Development Programme 2025.

Maddie Hewitson is an art historian and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She specialises in nineteenth-century British art. Her research focuses on the visual and material cultures that emerged from British encounters with the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-to-late Victorian period. Her Leverhulme fellowship project, titled ‘The First Covenant: understanding the role of the Hebrew Bible in Victorian art’ offers the first sustained analysis of the role the Old Testament played in British visual culture.

Siobhán Jolley FHEA is a specialist in the reception of the Bible in visual art and popular culture. She is currently Lecturer in Christian Studies at the University of Manchester and Visiting Lecturer in Christianity and the Arts at King’s College, London. From 2022-2024, Siobhán was the Howard and Roberta Ahmanson Research Fellow in Art and Religion at the National Gallery, working as part of the curatorial team. An expert in the portrayal of Mary Magdalene, her broader research interests include the work of female artists, the reception of biblical women and the New Testament, and feminist approaches to text, image, and curation. You can follow her work at @siobhan.jolley.bsky.social and, with increasingly less frequency, @siobhan_jolley on “X”.

Sarah MacDougall joined Ben Uri in 2002. She is the former Director of Scholarship, and the Eva Frankfurther Research and Curatorial Fellow for the Study of Émigré Artists. She co-supervises PhD candidates (on David Bomberg), with London South Bank University, and (émigré art dealers), Kingston University. Sarah is a Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies (London University) committee member. From January 2025 Sarah MacDougall moves from her full-time role as Director of Scholarship to a part-time position as Head of Collections and Special Projects, in order to further develop her freelance career as a consultant, curator and writer within the international academic and museum sector. Her first international project, Arte Britanica. Convergencias: British Art – Convergence, opens on 27 February 2025 at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

Farwa Moledina is a Muslim artist of Yemeni-Tanzanian heritage, raised in Dubai and now residing in Birmingham. Her focus lies in fostering nuanced discussions about faith, Islamic traditions, and the portrayal of Muslim women in contemporary art.

Hassan Vawda is a researcher, writer, and policy maker whose work explores the role of religion, belief, and spirituality in modern and contemporary art institutions. His research focuses on developing approaches to programming, audience engagement, and governance that address the harmonies, tensions, and questions that arise between art and religion. He is currently a Relationship Manager at Arts Council England, the UK’s national public arts funding body, where he founded and chairs the Multi-Faith Staff Network. He is also completing an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded PhD at Tate and Goldsmiths, University of London, examining how British modern and contemporary art museums engage with religion, belief, and secularism through the experiences of Muslim communities and the framing of Islam.

Previously, he has curated and produced projects and conducted research for institutions including Tate, INIVA, Barbican, National Trust and Kettle’s Yard, as well as collaborated with faith groups, community organisations, and local authorities on cultural and heritage initiatives. He was the Lead Engagement Officer for the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, working on contested heritage, public art, and the representation of statues and memorials across London. In 2017, he was awarded the Aziz Foundation Scholarship in Applied Anthropology and Community Development at Goldsmiths.