Religion and faith: The missing index of inequality in culture and the arts

Abstract

This short commentary – part of the special issue on ‘Craft Economies and Inequalities’ - calls for moving beyond the preferred indexes of gender and class in research on inequalities in cultural production, and considers what can be gained by including religion and belief in broader understandings of creativity. Drawing upon the co-curated exhibition ‘Beyond Faith: Muslim Women Artists Today’, it argues for centring religion and belief in debates on decolonising the artworld and creative sectors.

Creative Muslim Women is the short title for an ambitious programme of research and practice funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (2017–2021). ¹ For the first known time in a major grant-funded project, religion and faith were placed centre-stage in understanding experiences of inequality in culture and the arts. In this Cultural Commons piece I will introduce the co-curated exhibition, ‘Beyond Faith: Muslim Women Artists Today’ (at The Whitworth, 2019–2020), which marked the culmination of the wider project. ‘Beyond Faith’ was shown alongside ‘Four Corners of One Cloth: Textiles from the Islamic World’, and featured five Muslim women artists who were trained, lived, or practised in North-West England: Robina Akhter Ullah, Shabana Baig, Fatimah Fagihassan, Aida Foroutan and Usarae Gul. It was a mixed media exhibition that included textiles, mosaic and woodwork, besides painting and performance. Accompanied by a series of short films made by Ricardo Vilela about the artists, the exhibition considered their different pathways within the creative sectors, and reflections on their creative practice in relation to the historic collection. The exhibition run was extended twice and reached over 200,000 visitors. Here I want to discuss the contribution of Beyond Faith in the wider context of decolonising museum practices in Manchester, regional museums of the United Kingdom, and Western institutions. I suggest that treating religion and faith seriously, especially minority religions such as Islam that have been ‘Othered’ in Western contexts (Said, 1978), is a significant dimension to decolonising museum practices.

The eclipsing of a religious positionality in the artworld can be argued to be a kind of post-colonialism. Divya Tolia-Kelly and Rosanna Raymond (2020) rightly identify that ‘the curriculum, the university, the museum’ produce ‘an institutionalised set of imperial and colonial values and thought’, or ‘world-view’ (p. 7; see also Warren, 2020). Part of this world-view, as Tariq Jazeel (2013) reminds us, is the legacy of Enlightenment thinking that separates out religion from secularity. Yet a sacred-secular binary can be destabilised when confronted with a theory of aesthetics that might not be wholly religious but neither is decidedly secular (for instance, Jazeel considers Tropical modernism and southern Sri Lankan Buddhist aesthetics and philosophy which complicate any formal categorisation of religion). In the ways that we order and classify the world, including epistemic orientations in the language we use, there remains what Richard Phillips (2014) has termed a ‘colonial hangover’ (p. 502). Arguments for decolonialism/decoloniality have been made by influential thinkers such as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015). On decoloniality and ‘the future of Africa’, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015: 485) writes

Decoloniality speaks to the deepening and widening decolonisation movements in those spaces that experienced the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment. This is because the domains of culture, the psyche, mind, language, aesthetics, religion, and many others have remained colonised.

This quotation speaks to a multi-layered interweaving and uncovering of the symbolic, material and other-worldly. Western art is universalised as the global standard for art. Or, as Mitter (2008: 531) writes, it has been constructed as ‘a universalist canon within an epistemological framework that goes back to the Enlightenment’ (see also Mufti, 2016). Embedded within this logic are ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger, 1990) that have ‘faith in the universal’ of modernist art and aesthetics and that exclude art associated with the periphery (Mitter, 2008).

According to the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), the area of Creative Arts & Design reports the highest proportion of white students of any subject area (82% in 2018–2019; with only 2% identifying as Asian). ² Atypically white cohorts of students and graduates in Creative Arts and Design then embark on cultural occupations that can be highly precarious and very low paid. This fact underscores the point that the politics of social and cultural difference, including minority religion and faith, within the creative sectors and the lives of creatives is not a minor matter. Recognising the British artworld as atypically white and productive of a particular world-view can attune us into the possible existence of different structures of knowledge, and ways of being-in and apprehending our aesthetic world. Questions around a fuller politics of social difference and identity are pertinent given the growing awareness of the role that educational and arts institutions perform in reproducing inequalities in and through the attribution of status, and the ways in which this is spatialized (as core or peripheral) in the Western-centric contemporary artworld.

Religion and faith are often left out altogether in cultural policy and research on the creative industries and creative labour. Instead, the ‘preferred’ indexes of research on inequalities are class and gender (Brook et al., 2020), with more recent important work on ethnicity, race and racialisation (Malik and Dudrah, 2020; Meghji, 2017; Patel, 2020; Warren and Jones, 2018; Saha, 2017). The secularisation of cultural policy and the arts in Britain is historical, as Gilbert et al. (2019) remind us. They draw the moment of separation of state from organised religion – put simply, what a secular state means – with the founding of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946. The emergence of a state-sponsored arts sector after World War II meant that ‘the secularization of creativity was institutionalized in the developing relationship between the state and the arts’ (Gilbert et al., 2019: 28). A regional infrastructure of local state-funded institutions was established that was secular in approach. The separation of religion and faith from cultural policy and the arts remains pertinent today.

Strikingly, Arts Council England (ACE) in partnership with research consultancy, Consilium, undertook an evidence review of Equality and Diversity (cultural and arts sector data, policy reports and academic publications) where they initially found no examples that specifically look at religion and faith in arts and culture. In their second review, they detailed only two broadly relevant publications: a House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee report on Employment Opportunities for Muslims in the United Kingdom of 2016, and the think-tank Demos’ report of 2015 on ‘Rising to the Top’. The House of Commons report discusses the ways in which Muslim women suffer the greatest economic exclusion in society of all – 65 percent of Muslims described as ‘economically inactive’ are women. It looks at the complex reasons for lack of breadth in degree and employment choices; however, it also underscores the lack of data on Muslims (and other religious groups) and does not discuss culture and the arts or the creative industries. Meanwhile ‘Rising to the Top’ (Demos, 2015) reiterates the point that Muslim students are less likely to apply for Creative Arts & Design than Law, Medicine, Computer Science and Business. Tellingly, ‘Rising to the Top’ uses the imprecise proxies for ‘Muslim’ of ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Bangladeshi’ due to a lack of data on religion. Considering the overall paucity of research, Consilium and ACE inferred that religion was treated differently to other protected characteristics: either by being seen as too private, or as additional data for organisations (Consilium and Arts Council England, 2018; 64-65). Religion might be considered ‘trickier to pin down’ than other protected characteristics (Consilium and Arts Council England, 2018). In both the initial report, and the follow-up, it is underscored that, given the lack of evidence, there is poor understanding of religion as an index of inclusion in culture and the arts in the United Kingdom.

As is widely evidenced in cultural industries research, cultural occupations have a ‘particular sort of social status’ and are ‘highly desirable’, which can be attributed to the very fact they are marked out as middle-class and therefore ‘good jobs’ (Brook et al., 2020: 17). A distinctive shared solidarity and politics is found among cultural workers around values and social attitudes: ‘This new faction is liberal, open, and tolerant’ (Brook et al., 2020: 17). However, re-reading the notion of ‘good’ work through the lens of religion and faith reveals that there are contested values, beliefs and interpretations around cultural forms and the nature of creative work. As clearly shown by Beyond Faith, this contestation is evident across different Muslim artists and the diversity of Muslim communities and cultural scenes. Figurative art is a case in point. In the exhibition, Iranian artist Foroutan displayed an abstract painting of a female nude selected from a series of 28 oil on canvas paintings called ‘Women’s Life’. By way of contrast, Akhter Allah asked to have only her words – and not her voice or body – represented in her artist film. Not insignificant here is that there were distinctions and variations between the artists’ positionings as Muslim: whether ‘of Muslim heritage’, or as a more pious follower of Islam. But contestation around the display of the human body and veneration of images are not particular to Islam. Historic divisions and tensions around scriptural doctrine and the idolatry of images or ‘icons’ are common across the Abrahamic faiths, including in the iconoclasm (literally ‘image breaking’) of Byzantine Judeo-Christianity in the 8th and 9th centuries (see Lewis and Hamid, 2018; Milwright, 2017). It reminds us that the status of cultural occupations as ‘good’ must be widened to consider other factors, hitherto overlooked: time and region; religion, culture, class, and wealth; style and form; and whether work is displayed in a space marked as religious or secular.

Somewhat paradoxically, there is a growth of interest in what might be loosely termed Islamic art and Muslim identity in the Western artworld. In recent years, prestigious prizes by leading galleries and funders, and collections by Saatchi Art and other commercial art collections, have re-opened critical discussion about the place of Islamic art within contemporary art and the cultural industries more broadly. ³ By example, since 2009 the Jameel Prize has been awarded in conjunction with the V&A ⁴ for contemporary art and design inspired by the Islamic tradition, ⁵ and Digital Islamic arts received recognition in the Lumen Prize 2017, an international prize that celebrates art with technology. Meanwhile, in Iran in 2016, an exhibition of Arab modern art from the Barjeel collection opened at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art with considerable international attention. Significantly, the latter exhibition avoided referring to religion altogether, the ramifications of which I discuss next.

The term ‘Islamic Art’ remains controversial. Definitions of Islamic art typically use parameters of work from particular regions and territories, or time periods. Otherwise definitions are centred on religious Islamic identity–of the artist, the patron or cultural community–from where the work was produced. Framing a contemporary Islamic art scene is even more contentious. Yet art from Arab and Iranian artists, or art from the Muslim world, as it is differently framed, has become important if not one of the liveliest streams within the contemporary global art scene over the last 20 years, with a growth of the art market and spaces in Middle Eastern countries. In fine art, quite distinct from discourse and debate in media, religion has arguably been subsumed or obfuscated by the master signifier of region or ethnicity since 9/11. International exhibitions have mostly privileged a Middle Eastern locality and ethnic heritage of the artists over Islam and Muslim identity in the categorisation of the shows, if not the marketing visuals (for example, ‘Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East’ British Museum, 2006; ‘Unveiled: New art from the Middle-East’, Saatchi Gallery, 2009; ‘Light from the Middle East: New Photography’, V&A, 2013). Exceptions to this are LACMA’s ⁶ ‘Islamic Art Now: Contemporary Art of the Middle East’ (2015-16) – although still emphasising Iran and the Arab world – and our aforementioned exhibition at The Whitworth, ‘Beyond Faith: Muslim Women Artists Today’ (2019-20).

Attempting to open dialogue around narratives of ‘being Muslim’, ‘Beyond Faith’ coalesced around multiple themes of identity, culture, otherness, and belonging. These themes were co-produced through analysis of earlier stages of the wider research and workshops with the artists. For some of the artists certain themes resonated more than others and were questioned at different points in the exhibition’s production. The exhibition sought to provide a platform for a select group of women based on some shared characteristics, while not reducing, assimilating or speaking on behalf of them. Deliberately cutting across curatorial and educational functions of the contemporary gallery, the co-curatorial team included those associated with access and inclusion (education and learning), and distinction and excellence (curatorial). It therefore sought to offer a way of navigating new ground with awareness of how ethnic minority artists are often asked to work as cultural brokers and community bridges (Idriss, 2016), rather than as important international artists where work is judged on the criterion of originality and skill. ‘Beyond Faith’ used common aspects of peripheral identity markers in the artworld – Muslim identity together with gender – to begin to readdress social inequalities and to spotlight the contributions of Muslim women artists. It thereby offered an action-based approach to attempt to transform knowledge and findings of the wider research (see Warren forthcoming) into a structural intervention in the contemporary artworld.

We can think of decolonisation as belonging to the wider field of post-colonial studies; certainly a call for action is not new, although there is a palpable step-change around institutional and activist praxis. This calls for a progressive re-visioning of knowledge and ethical practices, which includes the re-narrativising of monuments in public space, and moving towards restitution and repatriation of stolen objects often obtained by colonial-era sanctioned violence that in the United Kingdom is being led by regional museums and galleries. Writing in 2009, Raghuram (2009) provide a useful way of engaging with post-colonialism that remains prescient for the struggles of now:

By reading post-colonialism not as the sanitised ‘after-colonialism’ but as anti-colonialism. . . Anti-colonialism [is] charge[d]. . .with emotions such as anger, anticipation and hope that make responsibility not a burden but forward-looking: it contains alternative visions, alternative understandings of how the world could be better. (p. 11)

Or as Stephen Walsh, an independent curator, formerly of Manchester Museum, wrote about the restitution of museum objects, ‘It’s not about what you lose, it’s what you gain’. ⁷ In this short commentary, I have called for moving beyond the preferred indexes of gender and class in research on inequalities in cultural production, to propose what can be gained by including religion and belief in a broader structure of understanding on creativity. Drawing upon the co-curated exhibition, ‘Beyond Faith: Muslim Women Artists Today’, I have argued for the place of religion and belief in debates on post-colonialism and de-colonialising the artworld and creative sectors, to better understand those dimensions of identity, practice, and inequality that are too often eclipsed from view.