Religions

The regime under which religion—any religion—functions in contemporary secular, democratic Western societies is freedom of belief. After the victory of the Enlightenment, faith became a private affair. Freedom of belief means that everybody is free to believe what he or she chooses to believe, and also that everybody is free to organize his or her personal, private life according to his or her beliefs. But at the same time it means that it is forbidden to impose one's own faith on public life and state institutions. The work of the Enlightenment resulted not in the complete disappearance of the religion but in its privatization, its withdrawal into the private sphere. Under the conditions of the contemporary secularized world, religion has become a matter of private taste—it functions in a way that is analogous to the functioning of art and design. […]

Darren Harvey-Regan's photographic suite Metalepsis (2013) juxtaposes formalistic images, often on the verge of abstraction, with images of religious figures. What does this juxtaposition do within the series and within the broader context of contemporary photography? The answer requires a longer look at the shifting relationships between concepts of abstraction and transcendence over the past century. Broadly speaking, abstraction, once closely allied with concepts of transcendence, came to be linked instead to repression by the 1960s. In light of this conceptual shift, Harvey-Regan's juxtapositions transfuse abstraction with a dose of its "prior" transcendent content. They also stage a series of questions around the relationship between two forms of faith in imagery: faith as a disposition to be represented, or performed, by images; and faith in the relationship between images and their ostensible referents.

In Abraham Abraham Sarah Sarah, Nira Pereg choreographs religious practices. The sensitive question of land appropriation in the name of religion is analyzed by means of rituals and material facts. Through her particular use of sound in these two perfectly synchronized videos, Pereg orchestrates the automatic and repeated gestures of two communities, each of which, in turn, territorializes the same place. This appropriation also allows the artist to create her own refrain, as Deleuze and Guattari defined it, as an incantatory response.

In countries where they have been long repressed, religious practices usually return with a vengeance. At the heart of the issue, the oft-forgotten case of Russia speaks volumes. The Soviet regime had banished Orthodox religion, considered (correctly) to be allied with the tsars: anyone who has seen Sergei Eisenstein's films will recall the foggy, monstrously silhouetted apparitions of popes, followed by the people's destruction of tsarist and religious symbols. Today, the Church is making a comeback. In an installation titled M.I.R.: New Paths to the Objects/Polite Guest from the Future,* young Muscovite artist Arseniy Zhilyaev imagines the consequences of this state of affairs by way of a speculative fiction in which a new religion prevails.
* The first subtitle, "New Paths to the Objects," was given to the version of the exhibition presented at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, January 18 to March 30, 2014, while the second, "Polite Guests from the Future," belongs to the slightly different version at the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, July 9 to August 23, 2014.

The question of how to generate an active relation to the future is crucial to Latour's work. Acting as some sort of secular prophet of the puzzling Gaia, the goddess who personifies the programmed disaster that also comes under the name of the Anthropocene, Latour exposes us to a civilizational choice. Following the idea that "a good scientific experimentation is like a theatrical situation of dramatization," he has recently collaborated on the Gaïa Global Circus project, an ambitious theatrical experiment that plunges into the internal drama of science in order to address the discrepancy between the gravity of the ecological crisis and our inability to react appropriately to it.

In his analysis of Mathieu Latulippe's exhibition Retour à Paradise Lost, Pierre Rannou explores the real place that religion occupies in the artist's approach. Although, at first glance, Latulippe's work seems to be based on a Christian cultural imagination, an attentive look at his works tends to show, rather, that they are articulated around the question of the sublime, implying a kinship with the concerns of romantic artists and with the notion of belonging to a religion of art through the notion of Kunstchaos.