Religion & Art Colab 2

Participatory exposé: “epiphany”

21 May 2025
Holy Trinity, Prince Consort Rd, London SW7 2BA
Elena Botts and Vancii F C Wahn
with Aly Gear, DJ Hatfield, Grace Papineau-Couture

How can new media and technology reinterpret traditions as both a creative expression and a spiritual reconfiguration of traditional cultures within dominant structures, fostering a shift in networked consciousness amid broader socio-political influences? How do participatory and collaborative practices in new media change, challenge, and chart the trajectory of this reinterpretation?

Elena Botts, Untitled (2023)

Elena Botts is an artist and researcher who organizes a project loosely termed “unknown sound collective” intended as an archive of experimental artists’ interior worlds, these that are externalized through their work, and the interchange through artist communities around the world, and the social change this may or may not represent. For Art & Religion Colab, this practice as research is evidenced in the work of collaborator Aly Gear, as a panel betwixt the two, and a performance by the artist.

British Textile Biennial 2023/Jack Bolton

Vancci F.C. Wahn is a researcher in curatorial studies at Essex. Her PhD project explores the activist journey of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples in reclaiming their cultural identities while constructing epistemological frameworks to support sovereignty advocacy and challenge colonial power dynamics, both externally and internally. She curated Indigenitude: Crafted Artivism in Taiwan for the British Textile Biennial 2023, using the history of international textile trade and filmmaking to highlight counternarratives in contemporary Indigenous textile and documentary film works.

Aly Gear, Window Series (2024)

Aly Gear is a Glasgow based artist, writer, and researcher from Foula, Shetland and the Northeastern USA, (unceded Lenni Lenape territory & unceded Nipmuc territory [NJ/MA]) whose work focuses on designing interventions against textual systems and the capacity of these systems to do harm. For the Religion & Art Colab she responds to the Ecclesiastical and Statist context of Holy Trinity Church, South Kensington via the computational re-animation of two critically curated historiographic Shetland based datasets that counternarrativize Shetland’s Lairdic Era (1707-1886), challenge the supposed “Death of the Shetland Norn Language”, and critically resituate the Shetland Norn language’s people’s coercive Britishization and cultural erasure by British Church and State actors. Aly Gear is an ancestor of a long lineage of Foula/Shetland crofters, (including the last speaker of Foula Norn), stretching back to at least the 1200s before Shetland was part of the British State or the Scottish State, and she is also an ancestor of Foula’s last merchant laird. It is from within this tangle that she makes this work. She studied Chamber Music & Multimedia Composition + Visual Art at Bennington College, Socially Engaged Art + Decolonial Theory + Poetics at Goddard College, and is currently completing postgraduate studies at Glasgow School of Art in Art Writing + Critical Technology Studies + Linguistics. Recent residencies include: Prattsville Art Center (New York), Gamli Skóli (Iceland), & KuBa: Kulturbahnhof (Karstädt). Recent shows include: International Noise Conference (Miami), Judson Church Memorial Dance Center (NYC), HGB (Leipzig), & Market Gallery (Glasgow).

 
DJ Hatfield recording in Cepo

DJ Hatfield presented “Pinokayan,” the sounds of net fishing in the Siuguluan River Estuary in Cepo, Pangcah Country. The work attempts to shift how we might listen to the ocean’s voice as transduced through triangular nets employed to catch fish and eel fry. When we attend to the role of mediation in our relationships with the ocean as a place of return (pinokayan), how does it challenge Western notions of spirituality as transcendent and unmediated?

Grace Papineau-Couture, performance still, 2024

Grace Papineau-Couture is a Canadian artist from Edmonton, Alberta, currently based in Chicago, Illinois. Working primarily in sound performance and sound installation, Grace merges the physicality and ephemerality of analog audio and folk storytelling to address the linkages between drone, myth, ritual, and superstition. With sound as raw material, Grace pulls apart ritual and superstition through field recordings, sampling, and uncanny instruments. Focusing on low-tech and ordinary objects as sonic instruments, Grace constructs haunting sonic meditations that embody breakage, variance within loops, repetitive action, and ritualization of labour. By using industrial materials like sheet metal alongside natural objects like tree branches as instruments, Grace materializes the blurred relationship between modern life and archaic fears through sound.

In collaboration with religionandart.org
With thanks to Revd Jennie Adams