Art of Faith: Beyond Installations in Deconsecrated Churches

Many places of worship, dedicated to prayer in past centuries, now host artistic installations. Have churches, once crowded with the faithful, now often empty, become the new temples of the contemporary? For centuries, religion has imbued European culture with a shared spirituality: not just faith, but symbolic and political order . With Charlemagne, crowned emperor by Leo III, the Empire became the "Holy Roman Empire," and for centuries the Church was a central element of European identity. Today, that cohesion has been lost. Devotion has fragmented, the sacred has retreated from shared liturgy to resurface in private, intermittent, subjective forms. And while Europe struggles to hold itself together—between the invasion of Ukraine, the resurgence of nationalism, and the protectionist thrust of Trump's America—contemporary art is once again crossing the threshold of the sacred, but speaking another language.

The interdisciplinary workshop “This Is Not a Church”, an exploration of the role that religious buildings can have in the urban future of the Ruhr

It is in this context that one of the most interesting projects in the run-up to the next European Nomadic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Manifesta 16, fits in. It will be held in the Ruhr region of Germany in 2026, a former mining and steel district undergoing transformation, a region that demonstrates how culture can become a driver of rebirth for areas marked by deindustrialization. As a preparatory activity for the exhibition, a listening and shared planning laboratory was created: the interdisciplinary workshop This Is Not a Church , organized with TU Dortmund, one of Germany's leading technical universities, coordinated by Josep Bohigas . A Catalan architect and urban planner, Bohigas is the First Creative Mediator of Manifesta 16 , a hybrid role combining creativity, urban planning, and cultural mediation. Students, architects, neighborhood residents, and local professionals were involved in a collective exploration of the role that religious buildings, today often abandoned or repurposed, can play in the urban future of the Ruhr.

Thousands of residents have been involved in a co-design process that will culminate in an open call for local artistic and social initiatives. This bottom-up governance, which characterizes Manifesta , aims to restore art's community dimension and ritual of participation. This approach places the local area at the center of artistic programming, making the Biennale not just an exhibition event, but an ongoing social and cultural process. The project highlights a common thread in many European cities where churches, once central to social and spiritual life, are now in crisis: closed, abandoned, repurposed . But not erased. The workshop posed a fundamental question: what can these buildings, at the heart of communities, become today, in an era in which religion has lost its centrality but the quest for meaning and belonging remains alive? The goal is not to transform the sacred into a museum, but to rewrite its boundaries: to seek new places of connection and coexistence, starting with the spaces that preserve their memory .

In many Ruhr cities, churches were at the heart of neighborhoods built to measure, anticipating the "five-minute city" model: places where worship, services, and relationships coexisted in an accessible and integrated space. Reclaiming these buildings today means reviving a true "revolution of proximity," focusing on reactivating the social functions of these spaces. This model recalls the experience of the Italian oratories, born from the intuition of Don Bosco in the mid-19th century: educational and social spaces, as well as religious, central to youth gatherings. A historical reference that, despite its distance, can suggest current community practices. From Germany, which today questions its religious spaces, to the medieval era that gave voice to one of the most radical figures of Christian mysticism, the sacred is once again a living issue. Last spring, at the Venice Art Biennale, the Historical Archives dedicated a special project,

The Biennale della Parola , dedicated to Meister Eckhart, a Dominican mystic born in Thuringia and contemporary of Dante. A liminal thinker, capable of stripping theological language to silence and vision, Eckhart was put on trial for heresy and some of his theses were condemned as suspect, yet many of the most important contemporary philosophers, such as Heidegger, have drawn from the pinnacles of his thought because "contemporaneity is the capacity to generate the future," as Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Venice Biennale, stated. Meister Eckhart's commentary on the Gospel of John became a choral performance directed by Antonello Pocetti, staged in the Portego delle Colonne of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, now the Ospedale Civile SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Sets by Antonino Viola, videos by Andrew Quinn, and sound by Thierry Coduys transformed the project into a multimedia work. The actors—Federica Fracassi, Leda Kreider, and Dario Aita—alternated between Latin and Italian, accompanied by the Gregorian chant of the Cappella Marciana Choir. The audience, gathered on a platform reminiscent of the medieval schola cantorum, was enveloped by words, images, and sounds, immersed in a timeless space where ancient and contemporary mirrored each other.

In this context, a parallel path opens up, one that has received less media attention than two major international cultural events like the Biennale and Manifesta , but no less relevant. It is the path of contemporary art entering churches that are still busy and open for worship. Here, the artist engages with ritual, community, and everyday presence. These are not decorative installations or symbolic gestures, but works that inhabit the liturgical season, engaging with expectation, silence, and the threshold between the visible and the invisible. A more discreet practice, but perhaps for this reason, more radical. In Europe, the experiment has historical depth: in 1949, Matisse designed the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, on the French Riviera. Here, stained glass windows, mosaics, high liturgy, and sacred objects converge in a total work that still exists today as a place of prayer run by Dominican nuns—the master's last spiritual masterpiece. In the United States, one of the most famous examples is found in New York, created in the late 1970s by Louise Nevelson, who designed the Chapel of the Good Shepherd inside St. Peter's Lutheran Church: an intimate, secluded, white wooden oasis, designed not to shock but to offer silent contemplation. Nevelson explained: "If people can experience a moment of peace, they will take it with them...", demonstrating a radical conception of art as an interior space, not representation.

A few years earlier, in Houston, Texas, collectors John and Dominique de Menil commissioned the renowned abstract artist Mark Rothko to create a secular sanctuary dedicated to meditation and inspiration. Rothko closely oversaw every detail of the architectural design: from the building's geometric form to the quality of light, designed to interact with his works . At the center of the chapel are fourteen large canvases painted in deep, dark hues, which are not exposed to the eye but draw you in, like interior spaces to be traversed . The chapel was created as a sacred place but also as a community center and still hosts meetings, readings, and programs dedicated to human rights and social justice. Over the years, it has welcomed Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, among others. Even today, after the restoration following the damage of Hurricane Beryl last year, the Rothko Chapel remains a hub for the community, with programs focused on interfaith and social issues.

St. James's Church in Piccadilly regularly hosts works by contemporary artists. It's not just a gallery, but a vibrant space.

In the heart of London, next to the Royal Academy of Arts, St. James's Church in Piccadilly has established itself as a true "Artists' Church," regularly hosting works by contemporary artists as part of a program dedicated to creativity in all its forms. In a metropolis where building community is not a given, the union between art and liturgy becomes an opportunity for gathering and civic reflection. For example, in 2022, the church commissioned a permanent work in the sanctuary from artist Jesse Darling—who went on to win the most important British art prize, the Turner Prize, the following year—but the artistic presence extends beyond, throughout the entire liturgical cycle, in dialogue with the sacred space. Not a gallery, but a living space, where aesthetics does not interrupt the ritual: it enriches it, questions it, and makes it contemporary. The tensions between contemporary art and liturgy are not a discovery, but today they seem to reveal something new. Where the Church demands order, art proposes fracture; where the ritual repeats, the work fragments. But it is precisely in this gap, this incompleteness, that another form of dialogue can arise: not conciliated, but alive. It is perhaps within this same perspective, which accepts conflict as a generative possibility, that the Vatican's growing interest in contemporary art and its languages should also be understood. At the last Venice Art Biennale, for example, the Holy See Pavilion was installed on the Giudecca, inside the women's prison: a project built on a direct dialogue between inmates and artists, which gave shape to a model of art "through my eyes"—based on words, gaze, and lived testimony inside the prison.

The Vatican's Department for Culture has promoted "Conciliazione 5," a "street gallery" curated by Cristiana Perrella

This year, on the occasion of Jubilee 2025, the Dicastery for Culture headed by Cardinal de Mendonça has promoted Conciliazione 5, a "street gallery" along the Via della Conciliazione leading to St. Peter's, curated by Cristiana Perrella. A work by Italian-Albanian artist Adrian Paci, inspired by the famous phrase by the English poet John Donne, written in 1624: "No man is an island," was installed a few weeks ago. A statement that resonates today as a call to interconnection, to the recognition of others as part of a single whole. In Palermo, the relationship between contemporary art and sacred heritage has long taken on original forms, rooted in the urban fabric and history of the city . A prime example is the public opening of the Baroque oratories decorated by Giacomo Serpotta, promoted by the Friends of Sicilian Museums over twenty years ago at the instigation of Bernardo Tortorici di Raffadali. These extraordinary places include the Oratory of San Lorenzo, marked by the loss of Caravaggio's Nativity, stolen in 1969. An absence transformed into opportunity: each year, a contemporary artist is asked to create a new version, as a symbolic gesture of reparation. In 2024, the work was entrusted to Michelangelo Pistoletto. In keeping with this spirit, the Ghenie Chapels Foundation—promoted by Alessandra Borghese in 2022 with the support of Father Giuseppe Bucaro—has restored three chapels to worship thanks to permanent interventions by the artist Adrian Ghenie. Two, in the church of the Madonna della Mazza, are dedicated to the new contemporary martyrs and to Father Pino Puglisi; the third, in Santa Ninfa ai Crociferi, reinterprets Santa Rosalia as a symbol of the city's identity. Not simple installations, but living presences, capable of reactivating the relationship between art, spirituality, and community.

In Palermo, the RIV Foundation debuted with the collective exhibition “Spazio Umano”, made more intense by the richness of San Mamiliano

A few weeks ago, the newly formed RIV Foundation debuted in the Sicilian capital with the group show Spazio Umano, hosted in the church of San Mamiliano, within the monumental complex of Santa Cita (or Santa Zita, patron saint of Lucca). The presence of this unusual saint in the heart of Palermo harks back to the settlement of Lucca's merchants in the 14th century, a vestige of a history of exchanges and connections that is now reactivated in the context of contemporary art. The project, conceived by Gianluca Collica and Patrizia Monterosso, brought together twelve artists of different generations and backgrounds—Adalberto Abbate, Francesco Balsamo, Tony Cragg, Francesco De Grandi, Aziz Hazara, Francesco Lauretta, Urs Lüthi, Rabih Mroué, Dala Nasser, Mimmo Paladino, Hans Schabus, and Alberto Scodro—in a dialogue with the sacred space. RIV was born as a curatorial project reflecting on the contemporary human condition and is part of a broader network of active experiences in Sicily, expanding where cultural marginalization is greatest. The relationship between art and location is intensified by the church's richly layered nature: the Renaissance works of Antonello Gagini, designer of the marble tribune and the chapel's arch, remain in situ, alongside the baroque Chapel of the Rosary, decorated with precious mixed marbles that simultaneously dramatize earthly glory and the inevitable transience of life. In this context, contemporary works do not seek easy connections, but rather open spaces for listening and attention . In a time marked by war, dehumanization, and the loss of value of human life, artists respond to indifference with gestures that demand to be seen and welcomed. The church is not merely a backdrop, but a living part of this encounter.

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