A new exhibition queers the boundaries between the sacred and subversive

Communing with God in a frenetic modern age isn’t easy, yet artists continue to try. From Warhol’s longstanding preoccupation with religious iconography to Joyce Lee’s erotic nuns, Maurizio Cattelan’s “La Nona Ora” (1999) – a hyper-real sculpture of the Pope struck down by a meteorite – and Chris Ofili’s elephant dung portrait “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996), artists are continually drawn to trace the tension between the fleeting and the eternal, the sacred and the profane.

The allure and presence of Catholicism remain particularly potent in pop culture. A new exhibition, God Willing, at the Shipton Gallery in east London brings together work by artists using different mediums to pick apart the tangled web of Catholic ideology and, according to curator Isabella Greenwood, to “subvert religious iconography from a myriad of backgrounds, and cultures that have otherwise been subjugated by religion”. Featuring artists with varied relationships to Catholicism – from Irish, Italian, Greek Orthodox, and Chinese perspectives – including Lily Bloom, Ariane Heloise Hughes, Chelsey Zi Wang, DaddyBears, Ronnie Danaher, Dyke Viagra, M Lissoni, Georgia Somerville, and Marta Burhan, God Willing unites artworks born from a desire to reimagine religion through a contemporary, queer vantage point.

“Religious iconography continues to be recirculated and trend, and I think it’s important to question why,” Greenwood says, explaining the guiding principle of the exhibition. “If these are systems that have subjugated us, how can we reclaim their symbology in a way that still lends itself to the weight of religious trauma, while reimagining it through a fun, fleshy and maybe even camp lens?”

Queering religious symbols, the displayed works reimagine the “sacred, hyper-religious textures” of flesh, blood, and metal. “These materials and motifs are given new life, rendered in unexpected forms and contexts that challenge their original connotations,” the curator tells us. “Lily Bloom’s blood-splattered fleshy castles evoke the sanctity of religious architecture while confronting its corporeal fragility, Dyke Viagra’s leather, tattooed prayer beads transform an object of devotion into a symbol of personal and cultural defiance and Chelsey Wang’s sleek, chrome-plated windows, juxtapose the cold sterility of metal with the warmth of embodied ritual.”

Elsewhere, Bloom’s souvenirs – a zine containing images of confession boxes, and keyrings inscribed with the word “forgiven” – are transfigured from ephemera to relics, as Greenwood suggests, “queering the boundaries between the sacred and the profane”. “Through this queer and contemporary lens, these artists suggest that sanctity is not confined to tradition but can emerge anew in the textures and detritus of modern life,” she elaborates. “Queering religiosity is important: queer culture has its own saints, idols, holy relics and archives, and functions in the same camp space of community, aesthetics and sacridity.”

While the exhibition seeks to subvert religious symbolism, this isn’t an exhibition about atheism or the death of God. Greenwood is adamant that we are not living in a godless age. “Despite the desanctification of religion, we are not entirely God-less,” she tells us. “God must be perpetually reimagined. Godlessness is remedied by reconfiguring our own understanding of the divine and reimagining the problematics of religion.”

Spirituality isn’t thriving in the digital age, the two conditions seem antithetical. Ritual, after all, is said to be the antidote to modernity so surely the inverse is also true. Greenwood remains emphatic: “Religion and religious experience are everywhere! Deinstitutionalising it is important, while not severing our attachment to ritual, sacred objects and faith, which are historically important aspects of the human experience that render our lives meaningful.” Amen.

God Willing is running at Shipton, Hackney Wick, until January 6, 2025.