Sacred Tensions
Event
Start date: Thursday 22 May 2025
Time: 16.30
End date: Saturday 14 June 2025
Time: 16.00
Location: Botkyrka konsthall, Fittja torg 14 in Norsborg
Featuring works by Rosa Häggbom, Nada Ali, and Brenda El Rayes, this exhibition explores the role of religion in contemporary art. Curated by Carina Hundsdahl as a degree project for the Curating Art International Master’s Programme.
Exhibition: 22 May – 14 June
Vernissage: 22 May, at 16:30 – 19:00
Artist talk: 3 June, at 17:30
What does it mean to speak of religion in contemporary art?
In Sacred Tensions, religion is not treated as a theme to be decoded or distanced, but as a living, complex presence within contemporary artistic practice. The exhibition challenges the secular norms that often render religious and spiritual expression invisible in art spaces. Instead of reducing sacred content to metaphor or psychology, Sacred Tensions invites visitors to encounter the religious on its own terms — with attentiveness, care, and openness.
Featuring a group of artists whose works are shaped by ritual, belief, theological thought, and metaphysical inquiry, the exhibition explores how religion continues to shape cultural life. These practices do not illustrate religion; they perform, question, and transform it — refusing easy separations between the sacred and the contemporary.
In a time of shifting worldviews, Sacred Tensions proposes that the sacred is not a relic of the past, but a vital part of the present. It holds space for both faith and doubt, for inherited forms and new rituals, for devotion and critique — not as opposites, but as forces in relation.
Curated from a post-secular perspective, the exhibition invites viewers into the tensions between the sacred and the secular, offering a space where religion is not translated, but felt.
The International Master's programme in Curating, including Art, Management and Law is a two-year curatorial education. It is a collaboration between Art History (together with the schools of Business and Law) at the University together with prominent art institutions in Stockholm. Curating Art is in equal shares an academic and practice based education.
Last updated: May 15, 2025
Source: Department of Culture and Aesthetics