Religion & Art: The Subjective
This is a call to artists and researchers for a one-day public event at Goldsmiths College, London, on Saturday, 14 March 2026, to explore the concept of the ‘subjective’ in relation to religion and art.
We welcome any media, especially film/sound/performance/installation/poetry or a mix, and invite participants to engage with—or depart from—the provocation of Hillel the Elder’s three questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”
This event is the fifth iteration of Religion & Art, a CHASE DRT-funded initiative led by Dr Nina Danino, Goldsmiths, Professor Jeffrey Geiger, University of Essex, and Revd Mark Dean, Arts Chaplaincy Projects, which began in 2020 with a symposium and has since evolved through multiple phases of research and development, most recently the Colab sessions in 2025.
The aim is to develop practice-based research in time-based and live work which engages in and expands the broad context of the Religion & Art initiative. Each event is documented and made available online as a research archive at religionandart.org.
We are interested in specific engagements with religious discourse or derivations as practice, thought, theory, ritual in practice-based research in art and interdisciplinarity. Religion & Art encourages a diverse range of responses whilst retaining a critical rigour grounded in practice.
Dr Nina Danino and Revd Mark Dean have coordinated the Religion & Art project since 2021 and having worked with researcher Elena Botts and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Teresa Calonje on the Colab sessions in 2025, they now invite them to a new collaboration in this next phase of the project.
In its 2026 phase, we add the question of the subjective to expand and include inquiry into interiority, perception, and the very concept of subjectivity, offering a speculative dimension to the ongoing dialogue between religion and art.
The event takes place over one day at the Victorian reconverted church St James Hatcham at Goldsmiths, London. It is intended as a low-fi research event. The main space offers high-quality single-screen video and sound projection with technical support; beyond this, artists are expected to provide their own audiovisual equipment for presentations, installations, or performances, although limited technical support may be available.
Whilst we welcome new productions this is a CHASE research-led initiative without a production budget. The event is held in person, emphasising audience engagement; however, high-quality remote online presentations are also accommodated in the main space (see photo below).
Artists and researchers based in and outside London are encouraged to apply. Participation is determined through this open call and a small number of invitations. Due to space and time constraints, places are limited, but a subsequent event may additionally be organized depending on the level of interest.
The submission call closes on 27 January, 2026
Please send submission proposals jointly to:
Elena Botts is an artist and researcher at Essex, BA from Bard, MFA from Goddard, 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, the interchange through artist communities around the world, and the social change this may or may not represent.
youtube.com/@unknown-sound-collective
Dr Teresa Calonje is a researcher and curator with a particular interest in questions of the body and its multiple forms of appropriation. In 2014, she edited Live Forever: Collecting Live Art (Koenig Books). In 2024, she earned her PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a dissertation on how performance art’s bodily gestures have come to be legally owned and sold on a market. She focused her research on artists La Ribot, Tino Sehgal and Luisa Nóbrega. Her current research concentrates on the influence of Christian mystics on contemporary performance practices. She has collaborated with the Goldsmiths’ Religion and Art Research group in 2021 with a sung piece to the thinker Simone Weil and in 2025 with a symposium on Christian mysticism and the apophatic in performance art with guests Dr. Nina Danino, Dr. Louise Nelstrop and Elena Unger.
Dr Nina Danino is Reader in Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London. She has made experimental and feature films. Nina Danino’s fifth and most recent feature film is MARIA (2023) on the transfiguration of the opera singer Maria Callas. Her most recent live work is XXXI. The Night-Song for Deptford X (2025) Her most recent publication is Experimental Film and the Subjective at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op—a series of conversations with women filmmakers by Nina Danino published and accessible online by Lux (2025).
www.ninadanino.co.uk
Revd Mark Dean is a chaplain to University of the Arts London, and coordinator of Arts Chaplaincy Projects. Prior to this he was a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London, and the Ruskin, Oxford. In 2009 he received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. Mark Dean’s video and sound works are held in the collections of Arts Council England, Leeds Art Gallery, MUDAM Luxembourg, and EMMA Finland. chaplachap.com
