Category Archives: Shared Sacred Sites

Exhibition and Workshop: “Shared Sacred Sites” From the Mediterranean to the United States. (March 29, 2018)

Conferences and Workshops, Shared Sacred Sites, Shared Sacred Sites Exhibition

Click here to read a thoughtful and rich review of Shared Sacred Sites Exhibition by Gordon Haber at The Forward.

 

International Exhibition Shared Sacred Sites is coming to New York City on March 27-June 30th, 2018, hosted by The New York Public Library, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and The Morgan Library and Museum.

 

Click the link below to view the official informational brochure of  Shared Sacred Sites exhibition. Scroll down to read the program of the Exhibition and the Public Events.

Official Brochure – Shared Sacred Sites, New York

 

Shared Sacred Sites- A Program

For centuries Christians, Jews and Muslims as members of the Abrahamic religions have visited and prayed at sanctuaries belonging to each other. This presence of “shared” sacred sites is a well–established phenomenon in the Mediterranean, revealing the permeability of the frontiers between religious communities. Despite theological differences, the three religions share a number of elements in terms of beliefs, rites, holy figures and places. These features have formed a fertile ground for the sharing of sacred sites across the Mediterranean and Middle East, although they have also historically led to antagonism between different religions and partition of some of these places. Yet today, many shrines and sanctuaries have survived across the Mediterranean world and welcome the faithful of different religions with hospitality and respect.

Shared Sacred Sites puts forward a powerful story of tolerance and cross-faith, cross-cultural co-existence. The project combines cultural events, performances, contemporary art, ethnographic material and digital interactive media to tell the story of a long, Mediterranean and Middle East tradition against current discourses of conflict, exclusion and fundamentalism: that of sharing of saints, sacred places, religious practices, and experiences between Muslims, Christians and Jews. We focus on the Mediterranean and Middle East not only because it is the historical birthplace of the three Abrahamic religions, but also because it is the space where the three religions came to negotiate with each other, in tension and in cooperation.

Exhibition: March 27-June 30th, 2018

Shared Sacred Sites is organized as a contemporary “pilgrimage” in Manhattan through three venues: The New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center.

At the New York Public Library, the exhibition opens with the history of the Holy Land, a look at Jerusalem as both holy city and center of pilgrimage for three faiths. An examination of Abraham’s vision of hospitality sets the stage for extending forbearance to the stranger and the unfamiliar. This mythical episode—present both in the Bible and the Qur’an—was also key to the New Testament command, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”  The exhibition then shifts to Moses, who engendered a common veneration at Mount Sinai in Egypt, followed by the Saint Catherine monastery, which was a stop for many Muslim pilgrims traveling to Mecca since the premodern area. Many of them visited the top of the mountain where there is still a mosque and a church. Mary has also been pivotal to the narratives that bind Christianity and Islam, as if encouraging the bridge between these religions through her shared sanctity. To complete a panoptic vision of shared holy figures, other characters are depicted and presented such as Elijah/al-Khidr at Mount Carmel, the Seven Sleepers, John the Baptist, and Saint Georges.

The Morgan Library and Museum brings an altogether different aspect of the story of coexistence and collaboration between diverse cultures in a display of the celebrated Morgan Picture Bible produced in Paris around 1250, which offers the most exquisite visualizations of the events of the Old Testament. With the passing of time and distance, the manuscript acquired inscriptions in Latin, Persian, and Judeo-Persian. It is a beautiful display of the contact of civilizations and a deep respect for shared heritage.

The Graduate Center at the City University of New York gathers contemporary examples compiled by an international team with various explorations and experiences in sanctuaries, presenting a medley of artifacts, contemporary art, multimedia, and photographs. Visitors of the exhibition will discover contemporary situations in the places such as Bethlehem, Djerba, Ephesus, Haifa, Hebron, Istanbul, and more.

 

Events

ALL EVENTS WILL BE OPEN TO PUBLIC, WITH HOPES TO REACH VISITORS AS WELL AS RESIDENTS OF NYC TO PROMOTE DIALOGUE ON INTERFAITH COEXISTENCE.

These exhibitions will be accompanied by a series of events that will feature music, conversations and workshops, highlighting the essence of these shared cultural experiences. The exhibition will open at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York on the 27th of March, with welcoming addresses and a presentation by Yinon Muallem, Meeting of the Hearts, a unique blend of discussion, sound and composition bridging across different religions and cultures. This performance was inspired by the mutual influences between Sufi mystic poetry and medieval traditions of Spanish Jewry.

We will continue with an opening at the New York Public Library on the 28th of March, with a conversation between three Faith Leaders from each of the Abrahamic Religions. Featuring Cheik Khaled Bentounès, Rabbi Rolando Matalon and Minister and Theologian Cláudio Carvalhaes, we will discuss the issues of mutual tolerance, universal understandings of hospitality that emanate from the tradition of Abraham, as well as how each religious tradition has within itself the capacity to extend to the other and promote “living together in peace.” Each of these religious leaders has thought, reached out and acted to counter the divisions experienced in the world. They will discuss their participation and their view of the tradition of sharing sacred sites between the three Abrahamic faiths. We will also try to breach the question of the relationship between humanitarianism and the three established religions. Why has religion not been a full advocate of humanitarianism? What can enlightened faith leaders do to change this? This event will be moderated by Anisa Mehdi, acclaimed journalist and filmmaker and director of the Abraham’s Path Initiative.  The discussion will be followed by a viewing of the NYPL part of the exhibit.

A day-long workshop at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York on the 29th of March will continue the conversations about pluralism and coexistence. Here, we will discuss the cases of coexistence, tolerance and intolerance in the Middle East through the lens of shared music and shared sites, as well as shift the focus to discuss the vagaries of pluralism in contemporary America. With a series of famed historians and social scientists of the United States, we will explore whether our long-coveted pluralism is now fuel for divisions.

See the workshop program below.

 

Previously Shared Sacred Sites traveled to Istanbul, Turkey (2017), Thessaloniki, Greece (2017), Tunis, Tunisia (2016), and Marseilles, France.

Workshop: “Shared Sacred Sites” From the Mediterranean to the United States: Perspectives on Pluralism (March 29, 2017)

Events, Shared Sacred Sites

We are excited to introduce our workshop “Shared Sacred Sites” From the Mediterranean to the United States: Perspectives on Pluralism, which will take place in New York City on March 29th, at Graduate Center, CUNY.

This workshop is a part of the international Shared Sacred Sites exhibition that will open on March 27th, at New York Public Library, CUNY Graduate Center, and Morgan Library and Museum. The exhibition will remain open until June 30th.

Please see our workshop program for more details.

Click here to download the Program.

 

Our workshop is supported by the grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art’s Building Bridges Program, and The Achelis and Bodman Foundation.

Shared Sacred Sites Exhibition in Thessaloniki, Greece 2017

Events, Shared Sacred Sites, , , , , ,
By Dimitris Papadopoulos

CONFLUENCE OF FAITHS:

SHARED SACRED SITES EXHIBITION IN THESSALONIKI, GREECE 2017

On September 23, 2017, we opened Shared Sacred Sites exhibition in Thessaloniki, Greece. Part of the international multi-year Shared Sacred Sites project, the exhibit engages the public in conversations about tolerance and coexistence among religious groups. This exhibition is hosted by three local institutions of art and culture: Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, and Yeni Cami, and funded by generous grants from Stavros Niarchos Foundation and Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation. On the first day in Thessaloniki, the exhibition attracted hundreds of visitors.

 

History of “Shared Sacred Sites” Exhibition

“Shared Sacred Sites” is a touring exhibition that communicates the themes of religious tolerance among communities without defaulting to the hollow rhetoric of “a dialogue of cultures and religions.” The exhibition makes the experience of shared sacred sites accessible to new audiences, through a medium of multimedia exhibit featuring a variety of themes. The exhibition in France at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM) described: “it seems vital, amid debates about the clash of civilizations, to demonstrate that alienation and abhorrence of the other are not the required modalities of interaction between the religions of [the] Mediterranean.”

Significant to exhibition are also host-cities, which themselves are sites of convergence of multiple traditions and cultures. The exhibition was first launched in 2015, at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM) in Marseilles, France and drew more than 120 000 persons in four months. From November 2016 to February 2017, it was featured at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. On September 23rd 2017 it launched in Thessaloniki, Greece and will remain open until December 2017. In March 2018, “Shared Sacred Sites” will travel to New York City, NY. Exhibitions in Istanbul, Turkey and Berkeley, California are under development.

 

Thessaloniki, a city of sharing

Lithography Hulusi Mehment 1891. From Parallaxi Magazine.

 Thessaloniki is a significant city in its rich history of diversity—religious and secular. Throughout the history of the Ottoman Empire, Thessaloniki was one of the most vibrant multi-ethnic and multi-religious trading cities of the empire. Its conviviality attracted all different religious communities and became known throughout the Empire. To this day, the city neighborhoods preserve vestiges of this interfaith cohabitation and collaboration.

 Retracing the city’s multicultural past recently became even more vital amidst the rise of intolerant and exclusionary politics in different regions of the world. Once in the past, the city’s diverse character was violently dismantled by the annihilation of its Jewish population during the Nazi occupation. Today, the narratives of tolerance become particularly critical as Greece finds itself in the middle of a double financial and a humanitarian refugee crisis at the margins of Europe and at the crossroads of human flows and mobility across the Balkans and the Mediterranean.

 Though this exhibition, we aim to revisit the city’s legacy of sharing, tolerance and diversity. Considering current debates of inclusion and exclusion, borders, encounters and interactions in Europe, the “Shared Sacred Sites” exhibition offers an alternative view of the Mediterranean as an open, shared and networked space and sheds light to both historical legacies of coexistence and contemporary cases of faith communities living and praying together.

By Elena Vanessa Caroline Kempf

 

The Three Sites of Exhibition

The three sites of the exhibit, The Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (MMCA), Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, and Yeni Cami reveal different aspects, both historic and contemporary, of “sharing the sacred.” We communicate the main themes of sharing through the photographic materials and films, modern and contemporary art pieces, ethnographic material, bibliographical sources that tell the stories of both the past and present of the crossovers of religious communities.

The Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (MMCA) exhibition provides the visitor with an experience that blends anthropological research and contemporary art. The anthropological encounter tells of shrines dedicated to prophets and patriarchs, to Mary and shared saints. The works of contemporary art, present a different locus for notions of sharing the sacred. Photographs, works of art, icons, and anthropological evidence are interwoven to evoke religious coexistence. With contemporary art, the exhibition raises questions concerning the power of religious symbols and practices that stand simultaneously at the core or at the edge of religion and faith.

 

 

 

At the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (ThMP) the exhibition presents a visual journey through the diverse geographies and communities of the Mediterranean. Places of coexistence and active sharing are revealed, next to cases where territorial disputes lead to conflict and physical separation. The exhibition uses multiple photographic approaches, where archival material meets contemporary documentary photography and scientific fieldwork research blends with the vernacular photo keepsakes of the pilgrims and devotees themselves.

 

At Yeni Cami, the exhibition presents a historical narrative of Thessaloniki, privileging a religious osmosis that occurred between the three religions as they accommodated to living together. Daily contacts, popular religious interactions, testimonies of travelers and the coexistence in particular sacred spaces and iconic monuments of the city are highlighted as treasured fragments of an experience now lost and a memory largely erased: that of Thessaloniki as a city once shared by different ethnic and religious communities.

 

Below is a description of the exhibit in Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, reported by the museum’s news medium.

 

A journey through geographies and communities of shared sacred places

The exhibition at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography unfolds in eight sections, where three distinct levels of photographic narration, one historic, one purely documentative and one artistic, are interwoven. We travel in regions where geography, history and tradition, social conditions and mixed communities crafted unique examples of cohabitation, of shared sacred sites and practices among groups of different religions.

Our tour begins from the “Holy City”, Jerusalem, sacred to all three monotheistic religions, where coexistence occurs, but in parallel and profoundly segregated ways. Divisions in the Holy Land become even more apparent in the section of the “Walls”.

The next sections on “Mountains” and “Islands” show us various communities, with lesser or greater isolation, from North Africa to the Aegean, where peaceful coexistence and the sharing of sacred sites constructed a common ground. Here the example of some Christian monasteries in Syria is high lightened as the confront the tragedy of civil war.

Through the numerous scattered “Sites of the Virgin” we encounter the timeless worship of Mother Mary by both Christians and Muslims, while in the section “Caves” we learn about exorcism rituals and about the legends of the Seven Sleepers that crosses through regions, cultures and religions.

Towards the end of the exhibition, the “In-betweens” of religious traditions and practices – and their hybridity – are explored in the Balkan region, while the makeshift worship places of immigrants in Greece are revealed in the section “From one coast to the other”, where a photographic project brings together diverse ethnic and religious communities and their experience.

To read the whole article click here.

 

Engaging the Public

Along with visual and interactive material, the exhibition also offers cultural events and performances that are open to the public.

By Vatsal Naresh

On September 24th, “Shared Sacred Sites in the Balkans and the Mediterranean: International Workshop” was held at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography as a part of the exhibition program, where international and domestic academics and artists discussed the state of religious pluralism and sharing in places of convergence of cultures.

 

 

On the opening date of the exhibition, Yeni Cami hosted a concert by Savina Yannatou, a talented singer, songwriter and composer, who captivated the crowd with her magical voice and exuberant charisma. Although her main repertoire consists of Greek traditional music, she also experiments with free jazz ans avant-garde styles.

 

 

Lessons from the Past

 When religions converge, the resulting crossovers are not devoid of ambiguity and can sometimes also lead to conflict. But among the examples of partition and division in the Mediterranean worlds, there are also examples of inconspicuous and often silent sharing. The presence of shared sacred sites reveals the permeability of the frontiers between religious communities the dogmas of which seem incompatible.

 The exhibition will be featured in Thessaloniki until December 2017. In parallel, the exhibition is adapted in Paris, France at the National Museum of the Immigration History from October 2017 to January 2018. In 2018, the Shared Sacred Sites project will reemerge in Marrakesh, Morocco at the Museum of the Confluences from December to March 2017. After Morocco, you can follow our exhibition in New York City, USA at three central cultural and educational institutions – New York Public Library, Morgan Library and Museum, and Graduate Center, CUNY – from March to July 2018.

 

Links

Shared Sacred Sites

Center for Democracy, Tolerance and Religion

UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix

Stavros Niarchos Foundation

 

Main Curators:

Dionigi Albera

Karen Barkey

Dimitris Papadopoulos

Manoël Pénicaud

 

Museums:

Thessaloniki Museum of Photography

Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art

 

Thank You

We would like to thank Stavros Niarchos Foundation along with the Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation, and the Mayor and the City of Thessaloniki for making the exhibition possible.

Thank you to UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix‘s stellar Eva Seto and Rachel Park for their generous and invaluable help.

We thank the city of Thessaloniki for hosting us and sharing its story of coexistence and tolerance.

And, most importantly, the biggest thank you is to our visitors for joining us and making this exercise in sharing possible.

 

 

Below is the gallery of additional exhibition photos.

 

Exhibition: “Shared Sacred Sites” in the Balkans and the Mediterranean (September 23, 2017)

Events, Shared Sacred Sites,

DATE:
Exhibition opens on September 23, 2017 and will run through December 2017
International workshop to take place on September 24, 2017

LOCATION:
Thessaloniki Museum of Photography
Thessaloniki, Greece

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
 “Shared Sacred sites”, a touring exhibition planned for September to December 2017 in Thessaloniki by a French-US collaboration team of researchers and curators, uses visual, interactive and mixed media to create an immersive visitor experience of a long, yet less known tradition in the Mediterranean: that of sharing of places, practices, and figures between the three monotheistic religions. Looking at the historical and the contemporary practices of sharing places, prayers and stories between Christians, Muslims and Jews it offers a timely alternative narrative to current debates on religion and violence and discourses of hatred, exclusion and fundamentalism. Having been originally curated by Dionigi Albera and Manoël Penicaud at the Musée des Civilisations et de la Méditerranée (MUCEM) in Marseille in 2015, it was redesigned for the Bardo Museum in Tunis (November 2016 – Feburary 2017), almost year after the horrible terrorist attack at the museum, and is planned to travel to Paris, Marrakesh, Istanbul and New York in 2018.

Our team of curators and researchers is currently working on reimagining the exhibition’s powerful story for Thessaloniki, in partnership with the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, and with generous funding from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation along with the Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation, and the support of the Mayor and the City of Thessaloniki. We consider Thessaloniki, in its regional significance and its particularly rich history of diversity, a prime site not only to host this exhibition but also to be showcased in it. Thessaloniki was, throughout the history of the Ottoman Empire, one of the most vibrant multi-ethnic and multi-religious trading cities of the empire. Its conviviality attracted communities of all different religions and became known throughout the Empire. One needs to walk in city neighborhoods today to see the vestiges of this interfaith tolerance and collaboration. The city’s diverse character was violently dismantled by the Nazi occupation of Greece and the annihilation of its Jewish community. Rethinking the city’s multicultural past has recently become significant and efforts are being made to retrace it. Through this exhibition, we aim to revisit the city’s legacy of sharing, tolerance and diversity. The narrative of tolerance and diversity becomes particularly critical as Greece finds itself in the middle of a double financial and a humanitarian refugee crisis at the margins of Europe and at the crossroads of human flows and mobility across the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Considering current debates of inclusion and exclusion, borders, encounters and interactions in Europe, the “Shared Sacred Sites” exhibition offers an alternative view of the Mediterranean as an open, shared and networked space and sheds light to both historical legacies of coexistence and contemporary cases of faith communities living and praying together.

For more general information on the Shared Sacred Sites exhibit and its history, please click here.

For the report and a selected photo gallery on the Thessaloniki exhibition from September 2017, please click here.