Despite the enormous wealth of religious objects in UK collections, museums remain wary of interpreting them in terms of their religious significance. Most objects and paintings are valued for their aesthetic or ethnographic qualities, and displayed in a social context, where visitors are not encouraged to distinguish between religious and secular meanings. Whether it’s fear of causing offence or sparking controversy, religious objects make museums nervous.
However, there are signs that a more nuanced picture is emerging, with museums starting to reflect the multi-faith communities they serve. A host of successful exhibitions and progressive learning programmes are bringing a deeper understanding of religions and their practice today. Islam, for example, is the second largest religion in the UK and the fastest growing, but has not often been presented as a living culture. The Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World, which opens next year at the British Museum, is one venture that will address this imbalance.
St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in Glasgow is a rare example of a museum that uses its collections to further the understanding and expression of different faiths. There are church museums, of course, and collections and historic sites with interpretation attached to single faiths such as Judaism, as well as Methodism, Quakerism and other non-conformist groups. But these often present their religious objects as part of a narrative of immigration and cultural assimilation.
“There are so many amazing objects around the country,” says Rebecca Bridgman, the curator of Islamic and south Asian art at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. “But nervousness and a lack of professional confidence means opportunities are being missed. Museums can provide a more neutral space to learn about different faiths.”
Birmingham is known as Britain’s most “faithful” city, because 75% of the population professes a faith. The Faith in Birmingham gallery in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery opened last year to provide a space for people to explore a variety of faiths.
Fifty objects of international significance, including two new acquisitions and contemporary pieces, were chosen in consultation with Birmingham’s faith communities. Co-curated with members of these groups, the gallery is unusual in that all the objects have parity. “Uppermost in the interpretation is each object’s religious significance,” says Bridgman. “Items on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) or British Museum have equal status with our own and those from elsewhere.”
Proportional representation
Islam was particularly under-represented in terms of the audience the museum serves in Birmingham, but with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Collecting Cultures scheme, and in consultation with partners including Birmingham Central Mosque, the museum was able to purchase two important items for the display about Islam. These are an Ottoman Qibla indicator, or compass, that shows the correct direction to face for prayers and a 19th-century French replica of a 14th-century Egyptian glass lamp.
“We learned a lot,” says Bridgman. “The Qibla enabled us to present Islam as a living culture by telling people’s experiences of Mecca and how it has changed, for example. Faith is such a personal subject we didn’t want a curatorial voice. We are continuing to develop and work with faith communities, adding new objects from the smaller faiths to represent a wider picture.”
As well as new objects, the faith gallery has drawn on existing works from the collections, such as the 1843 painting Prayers in the Desert, by William James Müller. This is considered the first British painting to depict Islamic religious practice, but prior to the faith gallery opening it was hung in the secular round room. Bridgman admits to being nervous about relocating it to the faith gallery, partly because it was kept in the round room for so long, but also because of its imperialist and orientalist connotations.
“This is a painting valued for its aesthetic quality and not made for a religious purpose, but the aim was to have a cross-section of objects in the gallery, so we were convinced it should be part of that,” she says. “Since its redisplay we have received only positive comments about its inclusion.”
Bridgman is also chair of the Islamic Art and Material Culture subject specialist network, which is helping regional museums identify their Islamic collections and use them as engagement tools. These include the Oriental Museum at the University of Durham, the Hull and East Riding Museum, and Blackburn Museum, which has a rare collection of Islamic manuscripts.
Complex belief systems
The story of the Christian absorption of pagan beliefs and observances has also been made more explicit at Jorvik Viking Centre in York, which reopened in April after floods in December 2015 forced it to close. The £4.3m redevelopment gave the visitor attraction the opportunity to draw on the latest research into Viking life.
Jorvik deploys animatronics to bring Viking York to life, and research into Viking coff n burials in the Christian setting of St Benet’s churchyard has inspired a new vignette of a Christian priest giving the last rites to a Viking woman. The priest wears a silk reliquary pouch embroidered with a cross, a replica of an item found in one of the coffins. This small and seemingly insignificant item can open up narratives about this period of assimilation without being limited by the isotopic evidence.
“It’s a tiny detail but it allows us to tell intimate stories about what they thought and believed as well as keeping the archaeology in focus,” says Chris Tuckley, the head of interpretation and engagement at Jorvik.
Other displays show the co-existence and transition between the two sets of beliefs, which took place across several generations. There is a replica of the Middleton Cross from St Andrew’s Church in Ryedale, which combines Christian iconography with mythical creatures, with a carving of a Viking warrior with a shield and axe.
“Assimilation is not a new story, but it is more in focus now, with religion and faith forming one part of this more nuanced story,” says Tuckley. “We want visitors to see that it’s a mixed picture and not a mono-culture, which was perhaps the perception of early medieval England when Jorvik opened in the 1980s. New themes are emerging in Viking studies and we wanted to tap into that research, bringing their beliefs and observances more to the fore.”
The British Museum’s new exhibition on faith and society – Living with Gods: Peoples, Places and Worlds Beyond – opens this autumn (2 November-8 April 2018). Designed by Real Studios, which did the V&A’s David Bowie Is show, the exhibition is likely to be another blockbuster for the museum. There will also be an accompanying BBC Radio 4 series of the same name, starting on 23 October, presented by the British Museum’s former director Neil MacGregor. The 30-part series follows the format of MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects radio series and book.
“This is the next stage,” says Jill Cook, the curator of the show. “A History of the World in 100 Objects showed how, as humans, we materialise our thoughts by making things. The objects here show how we symbolise what we make.
“The exhibition is not a show of treasures. Some items are new, but many are ordinary things – the important element is the mystical part of the experience. It’s not about what people believe, but that they do believe and how they believe, and that faith rather than conflict is a common thread through humanity.”
The objects are not necessarily overtly religious and are not refl ected in an art historical way as they are in the museum’s other galleries. Instead, the items have been chosen to reveal their power in communities and societies.
“The word religion doesn’t mean ‘to believe in supernatural spirits’, it means ‘to bond’ and comes from the Latin ‘religare’, or ‘to bind’,” says Cook. “Many rituals and observances are about bonding, sometimes to God, sometimes to the wider state, to family or to celebrity. We distinguish between faith and belief.”
Living on a prayer
Throughout the exhibition there will be contemplative spaces for the major world religions, but the opening object will be the Lion Man sculpture, which does not fi t into any faiths we now identify. This ivory figure with a lion’s head, standing 30cm tall, was found in a cave in West Germany. It is 40,000 years old and the oldest known human-made object.
“We start with Lion Man because it depicts something that doesn’t exist in the natural world and therefore shows that we have minds that are capable of imagination,” says Cook. “We know that it took more than 400 hours to make, so someone allowed all that time to create something with no practical use in an extremely cold period when survival was utmost.
“It’s not possible anthropologically to know what Lion Man was made for, but it could depict an avatar or a deity, something that connects to worlds beyond, which strengthens emotional and social bonds in order to marshal other strengths and forces,” Cook adds. “And we’ve been doing the same thing ever since. It’s a key characteristic of being human. There is no society in the world that does not have some form of belief and associated observances.”
The exhibition will include practices that replace religious rites and observances today, such as roadside shrines and ghost bikes – the painted white bicycles at sites where cyclists have been killed in London.
“These serve the needs of people who cannot find solace through one of the great faiths but need to go through a process to make their own connections with the dead,” says Cook.
One item is a perspex disc with a red tassel, the kind of thing you hang from the rearview mirror in your car, with an image of Chairman Mao. “It’s a modern totem of belief,” says Cook. “It has Mao’s signature and a prayer asking for his protection on the journey, like a St Christopher medal. Chinese millennials who never lived under Mao are showing how he is becoming an ancestor and a semi-deity.”
At the end of the exhibition, visitors will glimpse Lion Man again, but now with a new perspective, and a question is posed: homo sapiens or homo religiosus?
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist. There will be a session on interpreting Islamic objects at the Museums Association Conference & Exhibition, 16-18 November, Manchester. www.museumsassociation.org/conference
Weaving connections through faith
The story of the Huguenots, the French Protestants who fled to Britain from France to escape religious persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries, is told in the Huguenot Museum in Rochester, Kent, which opened in 2015. Although there are religious objects on display that tell of the horrors of domestic persecution, such as a family Bible that had been hidden inside an unbaked loaf of bread, information about the Huguenots’ Calvinistic faith (a strain of reformed Protestant Christian belief from the 16th century) is noticeable for its absence.
The Bible was a totemic object for the family and is now a totemic object in the museum,” says the venue’s director, Dinah Winch, who joined in 2016. “But we’d also like to explore what their faith meant to them in their personal lives. For example, which Bible stories did they tell and what religious subjects did Huguenot artists depict and why? These choices were important in 17th-century society, and more textured displays would bring out the emotional experience of the Huguenot refugees.”
One in six people in Britain today are thought to be descended from the 50,000 Huguenots who settled here, but many residents don’t realise they have this heritage. “Refugees have particular character traits that help them survive and thrive in a foreign country, and faith is an important part of the sense of identity they portray to the world – it binds people and provides support structures,” says Winch.
“The museum doesn’t have a large collection but we would like to build on it and connect to Huguenot descendants as well as with other non-conformist faith communities. There is a material culture out there that will support these stories and add breadth to the displays.”
A place for the devoted in County Durham
A new museum devoted to faith is being built as an extension to Auckland Castle in County Durham. Opening in 2019, the Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland will be the first museum in England dedicated to tracing religion and its impact in the British Isles over 5,000 years.
But why have a Faith Museum at Auckland Castle, out of the thousands of cultural venues across the UK? The reason is that it was the residence of England’s only prince-bishop. Granted exceptional powers by Norman kings, the bishop of Durham remained the virtual monarch in his diocese up to the 19th century, but, more importantly, the castle and its park represent the centre of a wider sacred Christian landscape that may date back as far as 1,500 years.
Auckland Castle’s permanent galleries allow visitors to explore the history of the prince-bishops – the residents of the castle for 900 years. The Faith Museum will be attached to the Scotland Wing, which has walls that date back to the 16th century and is where Scottish prisoners of war used to be held. Once complete, the new museum will have 10 gallery spaces across 450 sq m over two floors.
The museum’s 5,000 Years of Faith exhibition will feature artefacts such as a Catholic chalice from the castle’s collection, as well as other items loaned from major public and private collections. Showcased in chronological order, the display will cover Paganism, Roman beliefs, the rise of Christianity and today’s multicultural and multi-faith society.
Auckland Castle’s curatorial team has worked closely with an expert advisory panel from York, Cambridge,
Durham and Newcastle universities, and the British Museum to accurately represent the stories told in the Faith Museum.
The Auckland Castle Trust, based in Bishop Auckland, was created in 2012 to protect 900 year-old Auckland Castle. In September, the trust changed its name to the Auckland Project in order to reflect its ambition to turn the castle and the surrounding area into a major international visitor destination.
The £130m project includes the creation of the Faith Museum. The project’s first new attraction, the Mining Art Gallery, opens in Bishop Auckland later this month.
Laura Rutkowski is a freelance writer
However, there are signs that a more nuanced picture is emerging, with museums starting to reflect the multi-faith communities they serve. A host of successful exhibitions and progressive learning programmes are bringing a deeper understanding of religions and their practice today. Islam, for example, is the second largest religion in the UK and the fastest growing, but has not often been presented as a living culture. The Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World, which opens next year at the British Museum, is one venture that will address this imbalance.
St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in Glasgow is a rare example of a museum that uses its collections to further the understanding and expression of different faiths. There are church museums, of course, and collections and historic sites with interpretation attached to single faiths such as Judaism, as well as Methodism, Quakerism and other non-conformist groups. But these often present their religious objects as part of a narrative of immigration and cultural assimilation.
“There are so many amazing objects around the country,” says Rebecca Bridgman, the curator of Islamic and south Asian art at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. “But nervousness and a lack of professional confidence means opportunities are being missed. Museums can provide a more neutral space to learn about different faiths.”
Birmingham is known as Britain’s most “faithful” city, because 75% of the population professes a faith. The Faith in Birmingham gallery in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery opened last year to provide a space for people to explore a variety of faiths.
Fifty objects of international significance, including two new acquisitions and contemporary pieces, were chosen in consultation with Birmingham’s faith communities. Co-curated with members of these groups, the gallery is unusual in that all the objects have parity. “Uppermost in the interpretation is each object’s religious significance,” says Bridgman. “Items on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) or British Museum have equal status with our own and those from elsewhere.”
Proportional representation
Islam was particularly under-represented in terms of the audience the museum serves in Birmingham, but with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Collecting Cultures scheme, and in consultation with partners including Birmingham Central Mosque, the museum was able to purchase two important items for the display about Islam. These are an Ottoman Qibla indicator, or compass, that shows the correct direction to face for prayers and a 19th-century French replica of a 14th-century Egyptian glass lamp.
“We learned a lot,” says Bridgman. “The Qibla enabled us to present Islam as a living culture by telling people’s experiences of Mecca and how it has changed, for example. Faith is such a personal subject we didn’t want a curatorial voice. We are continuing to develop and work with faith communities, adding new objects from the smaller faiths to represent a wider picture.”
As well as new objects, the faith gallery has drawn on existing works from the collections, such as the 1843 painting Prayers in the Desert, by William James Müller. This is considered the first British painting to depict Islamic religious practice, but prior to the faith gallery opening it was hung in the secular round room. Bridgman admits to being nervous about relocating it to the faith gallery, partly because it was kept in the round room for so long, but also because of its imperialist and orientalist connotations.
“This is a painting valued for its aesthetic quality and not made for a religious purpose, but the aim was to have a cross-section of objects in the gallery, so we were convinced it should be part of that,” she says. “Since its redisplay we have received only positive comments about its inclusion.”
Bridgman is also chair of the Islamic Art and Material Culture subject specialist network, which is helping regional museums identify their Islamic collections and use them as engagement tools. These include the Oriental Museum at the University of Durham, the Hull and East Riding Museum, and Blackburn Museum, which has a rare collection of Islamic manuscripts.
Complex belief systems
The story of the Christian absorption of pagan beliefs and observances has also been made more explicit at Jorvik Viking Centre in York, which reopened in April after floods in December 2015 forced it to close. The £4.3m redevelopment gave the visitor attraction the opportunity to draw on the latest research into Viking life.
Jorvik deploys animatronics to bring Viking York to life, and research into Viking coff n burials in the Christian setting of St Benet’s churchyard has inspired a new vignette of a Christian priest giving the last rites to a Viking woman. The priest wears a silk reliquary pouch embroidered with a cross, a replica of an item found in one of the coffins. This small and seemingly insignificant item can open up narratives about this period of assimilation without being limited by the isotopic evidence.
“It’s a tiny detail but it allows us to tell intimate stories about what they thought and believed as well as keeping the archaeology in focus,” says Chris Tuckley, the head of interpretation and engagement at Jorvik.
Other displays show the co-existence and transition between the two sets of beliefs, which took place across several generations. There is a replica of the Middleton Cross from St Andrew’s Church in Ryedale, which combines Christian iconography with mythical creatures, with a carving of a Viking warrior with a shield and axe.
“Assimilation is not a new story, but it is more in focus now, with religion and faith forming one part of this more nuanced story,” says Tuckley. “We want visitors to see that it’s a mixed picture and not a mono-culture, which was perhaps the perception of early medieval England when Jorvik opened in the 1980s. New themes are emerging in Viking studies and we wanted to tap into that research, bringing their beliefs and observances more to the fore.”
The British Museum’s new exhibition on faith and society – Living with Gods: Peoples, Places and Worlds Beyond – opens this autumn (2 November-8 April 2018). Designed by Real Studios, which did the V&A’s David Bowie Is show, the exhibition is likely to be another blockbuster for the museum. There will also be an accompanying BBC Radio 4 series of the same name, starting on 23 October, presented by the British Museum’s former director Neil MacGregor. The 30-part series follows the format of MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects radio series and book.
“This is the next stage,” says Jill Cook, the curator of the show. “A History of the World in 100 Objects showed how, as humans, we materialise our thoughts by making things. The objects here show how we symbolise what we make.
“The exhibition is not a show of treasures. Some items are new, but many are ordinary things – the important element is the mystical part of the experience. It’s not about what people believe, but that they do believe and how they believe, and that faith rather than conflict is a common thread through humanity.”
The objects are not necessarily overtly religious and are not refl ected in an art historical way as they are in the museum’s other galleries. Instead, the items have been chosen to reveal their power in communities and societies.
“The word religion doesn’t mean ‘to believe in supernatural spirits’, it means ‘to bond’ and comes from the Latin ‘religare’, or ‘to bind’,” says Cook. “Many rituals and observances are about bonding, sometimes to God, sometimes to the wider state, to family or to celebrity. We distinguish between faith and belief.”
Living on a prayer
Throughout the exhibition there will be contemplative spaces for the major world religions, but the opening object will be the Lion Man sculpture, which does not fi t into any faiths we now identify. This ivory figure with a lion’s head, standing 30cm tall, was found in a cave in West Germany. It is 40,000 years old and the oldest known human-made object.
“We start with Lion Man because it depicts something that doesn’t exist in the natural world and therefore shows that we have minds that are capable of imagination,” says Cook. “We know that it took more than 400 hours to make, so someone allowed all that time to create something with no practical use in an extremely cold period when survival was utmost.
“It’s not possible anthropologically to know what Lion Man was made for, but it could depict an avatar or a deity, something that connects to worlds beyond, which strengthens emotional and social bonds in order to marshal other strengths and forces,” Cook adds. “And we’ve been doing the same thing ever since. It’s a key characteristic of being human. There is no society in the world that does not have some form of belief and associated observances.”
The exhibition will include practices that replace religious rites and observances today, such as roadside shrines and ghost bikes – the painted white bicycles at sites where cyclists have been killed in London.
“These serve the needs of people who cannot find solace through one of the great faiths but need to go through a process to make their own connections with the dead,” says Cook.
One item is a perspex disc with a red tassel, the kind of thing you hang from the rearview mirror in your car, with an image of Chairman Mao. “It’s a modern totem of belief,” says Cook. “It has Mao’s signature and a prayer asking for his protection on the journey, like a St Christopher medal. Chinese millennials who never lived under Mao are showing how he is becoming an ancestor and a semi-deity.”
At the end of the exhibition, visitors will glimpse Lion Man again, but now with a new perspective, and a question is posed: homo sapiens or homo religiosus?
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist. There will be a session on interpreting Islamic objects at the Museums Association Conference & Exhibition, 16-18 November, Manchester. www.museumsassociation.org/conference
Weaving connections through faith
The story of the Huguenots, the French Protestants who fled to Britain from France to escape religious persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries, is told in the Huguenot Museum in Rochester, Kent, which opened in 2015. Although there are religious objects on display that tell of the horrors of domestic persecution, such as a family Bible that had been hidden inside an unbaked loaf of bread, information about the Huguenots’ Calvinistic faith (a strain of reformed Protestant Christian belief from the 16th century) is noticeable for its absence.
The Bible was a totemic object for the family and is now a totemic object in the museum,” says the venue’s director, Dinah Winch, who joined in 2016. “But we’d also like to explore what their faith meant to them in their personal lives. For example, which Bible stories did they tell and what religious subjects did Huguenot artists depict and why? These choices were important in 17th-century society, and more textured displays would bring out the emotional experience of the Huguenot refugees.”
One in six people in Britain today are thought to be descended from the 50,000 Huguenots who settled here, but many residents don’t realise they have this heritage. “Refugees have particular character traits that help them survive and thrive in a foreign country, and faith is an important part of the sense of identity they portray to the world – it binds people and provides support structures,” says Winch.
“The museum doesn’t have a large collection but we would like to build on it and connect to Huguenot descendants as well as with other non-conformist faith communities. There is a material culture out there that will support these stories and add breadth to the displays.”
A place for the devoted in County Durham
A new museum devoted to faith is being built as an extension to Auckland Castle in County Durham. Opening in 2019, the Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland will be the first museum in England dedicated to tracing religion and its impact in the British Isles over 5,000 years.
But why have a Faith Museum at Auckland Castle, out of the thousands of cultural venues across the UK? The reason is that it was the residence of England’s only prince-bishop. Granted exceptional powers by Norman kings, the bishop of Durham remained the virtual monarch in his diocese up to the 19th century, but, more importantly, the castle and its park represent the centre of a wider sacred Christian landscape that may date back as far as 1,500 years.
Auckland Castle’s permanent galleries allow visitors to explore the history of the prince-bishops – the residents of the castle for 900 years. The Faith Museum will be attached to the Scotland Wing, which has walls that date back to the 16th century and is where Scottish prisoners of war used to be held. Once complete, the new museum will have 10 gallery spaces across 450 sq m over two floors.
The museum’s 5,000 Years of Faith exhibition will feature artefacts such as a Catholic chalice from the castle’s collection, as well as other items loaned from major public and private collections. Showcased in chronological order, the display will cover Paganism, Roman beliefs, the rise of Christianity and today’s multicultural and multi-faith society.
Auckland Castle’s curatorial team has worked closely with an expert advisory panel from York, Cambridge,
Durham and Newcastle universities, and the British Museum to accurately represent the stories told in the Faith Museum.
The Auckland Castle Trust, based in Bishop Auckland, was created in 2012 to protect 900 year-old Auckland Castle. In September, the trust changed its name to the Auckland Project in order to reflect its ambition to turn the castle and the surrounding area into a major international visitor destination.
The £130m project includes the creation of the Faith Museum. The project’s first new attraction, the Mining Art Gallery, opens in Bishop Auckland later this month.
Laura Rutkowski is a freelance writer