Religion & Art Live at Holy Trinity, Prince Consort Rd

4 May 2024
Holy Trinity, Prince Consort Rd
London SW7 2BA

with Linda Mary Montano

Presented in partnership with Religion & Art, Goldsmiths College

Magnificat

Nunc dimittis

Anthem

Linda Mary Montano has spent a lifetime exploring the relation between art and spirituality, through her radically collaborative performance and video work.

On 4 May 2024 Linda performed her own setting of the canticles and anthem, live via video link from New York, for a special service of Evensong in Holy Trinity Prince Consort Rd.

The event also included a screening of a selection of Linda’s video works, including

‘Performance Art’s ability to de-automate the artist and viewer makes it a worthy vehicle for mystical transformation’ – Linda Mary Montano. As the world submits more and more to the abstractions of capital, the interconnectivity of digital networks, advertising overload, and consumerism, there also appears to be a reawakened interest in visionary perspectives, the language of mystery, or the freed language of what we could call faith. In contemporary Western culture the liminal space of the transformer, the oracle, the innovator, the deviant, the mystic, and the mad is often occupied by the performance artist. Linda’s work seems more pertinent than ever in its attempt to dissolve the border between art and life through intricate ceremonies, some which seem to not only hold the duration of years, but of a lifetime. Her art and life are characterized by exquisite risks—paradoxical, personal, bodily, artistic, egoic. Her current position as a Catholic artist is tense as it positions the limits and restrictions placed on Catholic practitioners against the questioning of limitations inherent in performance art. A letter to Pope John Paul II, written by the artist, movingly illustrates this: ‘It is with a heart filled with contradictions and paradox that I address this letter to you. It is a letter of public admission of my position as a Catholic Performance Artist. The title is almost a contestable oxymoron. How can they both co-exist . . . the vocation to be a performance artist and loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church? This is mystery.’ – Bomb Magazine