Projects
Festival 2010
2010
Last year, Art Beyond Belief ran a successful Festival of Dialogue in Slough. This year we are organizing further events across the Thames Valley in conjunction with SEEFF. There will be a number of round table discussions organized across the area, followed by a conference in Slough on 22nd May.
During the events, we will be looking further at some of the preconceptions that various groups have of others, and attempting to identify ways in which these destructive patterns can be dismantled and replaced with positive communication and understanding.
Could you, or your interfaith group, run a local discussion event?
- a toolkit including background information will be provided
Sign up now for the conference or to attend a local discussion event
There will be a limited amount of exhibition space available at the conference too
To book, or for more information, please contact us at Art Beyond Belief,
email andrea@art-beyond-belief.com. Telephone 07958 320686
Rucksack
2010
Rucksack is a three-year project funded by The LankellyChase Foundation, working with children and young people with Asperger’s Syndrome and their siblings to explore family life and relationships. Rucksack is an innovative programme that helps provide a vocabulary for self expression and understanding ...
Via Dolorosa
2009
The idea of ‘giving away’ a piece of Christian devotion was something that took a lot of discussion and soul searching. Here was something very specifically Christian; normally, there are small plaques around a church to commemorate each station, with prayers said at each one.
We asked ourselves some questions. What if we replace these plaques with video monitors, and at each one show a multimedia presentation representing that station? What if we invite artists of other faiths to work on the content of each? In short, what if we give it away?
The Via Dolorosa project is the answer to theses questions. Planning began in Summer 2003, with a pilot project of two stations completed in January 2004. In October 2004 we were awarded Arts Council England funding to complete the project, which was shown for the first time in March 2005 at its home church of St Mary’s in Slough.
What is the Via Dolorosa?
Early Christians would sometimes visit Jerusalem as pilgrims, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and reflect upon his life and death. One of the journeys they would make followed the walk that Jesus took to the place where he was killed by crucifixion.
The path that Jesus had walked became known as the Via Dolorosa – the way of pain, or of sorrow. Pilgrims would stop at various places along the route to pray and to contemplate what happened there, and would mark the stages of the journey for others to follow.
By the fourteenth century, series of ‘stations’ were to be found at monasteries and churches to enable these devotions without the need to travel to Jerusalem. The traditional fourteen stations first appeared in the sixteenth century, and were standardised by the eighteenth century. The last, fifteenth station is a more recent addition that is included in some traditions.
Festival of Dialogue
2009
On 21st February the Festival of Dialogue culminated in a highly successful interfaith conference held at St Mary's Church in Slough. More than 150 people of different faiths and none shared their experiences, and put questions to a multi-faith panel. The evening ended with food and entertainment. In the lead up to the conference, six round table discussions were held on the subjects of gender, spirituality, age, responsibility, compassion and religion in a secular world. There were also ‘borrow-a-person’ events at Slough Library, giving people the opportunity to talk one-to-one with a person of a different faith.
Faith Junction
2009
Faith Junction involved teams of two ordinary people of faith interviewing members of another faith. The interviews were based on ten questions put together by Slough Faith Partnership. The interviews have been edited to produce a series of educational DVDs. They are ideal for use as a talking point for discussion, or a focus for meetings where religious harmony or religious difference is a key issue.
Art Monitor
2009
Art Monitor comprises a series of programmes designed to help members of vulnerable communities increase self-confidence, communication skills and self-determination. The programmes are designed for people with learning difficulties, those with mental health issues, victims of domestic violence, carers, young offenders, children and young people excluded from mainstream education, and others. The programmes use photographic and audio-visual techniques to encourage participation in story-telling through graphic media. Participants are introduced to the use of top-quality graphics applications on Mac computers and, using these, are encouraged to explore their potential creativity.
Insight
2008
Insight is a completely new style of interfaith training developed by Art Beyond Belief with funding from the Sir Halley Stewart Trust. Insight challenges many preconceptions - of other faiths and cultures, of other people - and also of yourself - your faith and your culture. Who has responsibility for attitudes to a faith? Should we care what other people think of our faith? Should we be prepared to make compromises, and if so, in what areas? Can we have dialogue without compromise? What happens when the going gets tough? Are we prepared to settle for comfortable, box-ticking interfaith, or do we aim for something more meaningful and potent? Insight is delivered in an engaging and challenging way, using innovative computer-based techniques ...
The Other Way
2008
The linocut prints that make up the exhibition The Other Way were created during the 1960s and early 1970s by young people attending Israelʼs first comprehensive school in Beersheba. The school was unique at that time, in that it was open to children from every culture, and so the prints represent co-operation between Jewish, Muslim and Christian young people, mostly aged 14 or 15 when they took part in this project. The exhibition's home is now owned by the Ecumenical Centre of the Cross of Nails in Würzburg. (The centre gets its name from its work in reconciliation alongside the Cross of Nails project in Coventry) The centre has provided the exhibition with a permanent home in the Lutheran Deanery Church of Saint Stephan. In 2004 we brought the exhibition to the UK. It was shown at St Mary's Church in Slough, at the Drawing Schools at Eton College and at the Riverhouse Studio in Walton-on-Thames. We hope to bring the exhibition back to the UK in the not too distant future.
Allegretto
2008
During the course of our Music into Upton project, Senior Physiotherapist Catherine Bray noticed that some of her patients with Parkinson’s Disease showed a marked improvement in their gait when they were interacting with the live music being played. Thanks to funding from the Trusthouse Charitable Trust, we were able to develop and run the Allegretto project specifically for this group. See the Allegretto reports for more details.
Music into Upton
2008
Music into Upton was designed for two purposes – to bring live music as a benefit both in health improvement and quality of life to patients and staff at the hospital, and to develop, alongside the Sidney De Haan Research Centre at Canterbury Christ Church University, andevaluation of this type of musical activity in healthcare settings.This was a highly successful programme that led directly to the development of Allegretto for Parkinson’s patients. More information is available in the downloadable programme reports.
Download the MiU interim report
