The Art-Heritage-Religion Nexus: Global Comparisons

Call for presentations for an interdisciplinary research workshop

Organized by Erik Meinema in the context of the NWO Veni-project ‘Art, Religion, or Heritage?’

In cooperation with the Memory and Heritage Network at Utrecht University

Friday September 12, 2025

Venue to be announced

Deadline for abstracts: 20 June, 2025

This workshop aims to critically analyse how the frames of ‘art’, ‘heritage’ and ‘religion’ are mobilized to (re)present elements of the past and mark these as relevant for the present. Within critical heritage studies, scholars have examined the historical roots of heritage preservation efforts and their expansion across the globe. Yet, this field does not always take the role of religion in heritage politics into account, notwithstanding the fact that religious sites, practices, and things are refashioned as cultural heritage across the globe. Scholars recently started to examine such transformations in Europe, a continent in which various patterns of secularization have taken place. Here, declining church attendance and religious belief often goes together with efforts to reinterpret Christianity as cultural heritage, in ways that revalue it through a secular frame (Weir and Wijnia 2023). Such heritagization of religion sacralises it in new secular ways that tie people together in new social, cultural, and political configurations (Isnart and Cerezales 2020). In other instances, art is created out of the ‘sacred waste’ of Europe’s religious past (Stengs 2014), for example when art is made in and of re-used churches (Kuyk 2023). The point is that elements from the past may be understood through shifting political-aesthetic frames that may continue to operate side-by-side. These frames mobilize different custodians, preservation efforts, and interactions between humans and things alternatively framed as religion, art, or heritage (Burchardt 2020).

While scholars are beginning to explore the relations between art, heritage, and religion in Europe, far less is known about how these shifting frames operate beyond the West. Furthermore, studying the multiple frames through which the past is understood calls for an interdisciplinary approach, as things and practices are often categorized and studied as ‘art’, or ‘religion’, or ‘heritage’ within individual disciplines. Consequently, this workshop invites participants from different disciplines who work on different parts of the world to reflect on the following questions: What is highlighted or downplayed when elements of the past are (re)interpreted as art, heritage, or religion? How do interactions with the past change as soon as elements of it are (re)framed as art, religion, or heritage? What new (political, economic, social) opportunities and challenges may arise when things and practices are (re)presented in new ways?

The workshop invites submissions for papers that reflect on the shifting ways in which the past is categorized and understood across the globe: from heritage to art, from religion to heritage, or from art to religion – or vice versa. Paper proposals should include: (1) a title of the presentation; (2) the name and institutional affiliation of the author; (3) a 300-word abstract. Please send your abstracts to Erik Meinema (e.h.meinema@uu.nl), before 20 June 2025.