You are cordially invited to the inaugural meeting of the Spirituality and the Arts Special Interest Group (SASIG) on Wednesday 16th March from 6pm to 7:30pm GMT.

About the SIG

The SASIG will meet to discuss the intersection of the arts and spirituality in a variety of forms and mediums such as visual art, music, film, dance, digital, interactive, poetry, time-based and performative art forms. This will include the personal, social and cultural, encompassing both the religious and the spiritual-but-not-religious context.

The group aims to explore a variety of relationships between the arts and spirituality. These are some possibilities:

• Art as a spiritual practice 
• Spirituality as creative practice
• Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) caused by an encounter with the arts
• Art and the transformation of consciousness
• Art, Spirituality and Social Change

Our approach aims to be interdisciplinary, so we will explore the juncture of the arts and spirituality through the lenses of consciousness studies, spirituality studies, religious studies, theology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, health/wellbeing, philosophy, art, aesthetics and literary theories, musicology; and through the lens of different agents: artists, curators, therapists, academics and independent scholars, general public, popular initiatives, etc.           

Aims of the SASIG:

• Explore and encourage the development of conceptual criteria to detect and discuss the spiritual qualities in the arts
• Encourage more scholarly research on the relationship between the arts and spirituality
• Explore and encourage the discourse of the spiritual in both public and private spheres of art
• Explore and encourage the establishment of conceptual means and language that would be useful to artists who are interested in incorporating aspects of spirituality in their artworks and their practices

All SIG meetings will be free for INSS members. Non-members are welcome to attend the inaugural event for free and subsequent ones for a small fee.

The SIG Chairs are Annalisa Burello, the Rev. Prof. June Boyce-Tillman and Dr Lila Moore. For more details, see https://spiritualitystudiesnetwork.org/Spirituality-and-the-Arts-SIG

About the inaugural meeting

To get the discussion going, for our first Zoom SASIG event we have chosen the title Provocations and we will present three brief presentations to help stir a debate about some of the controversies surrounding spirituality and art. The chosen topics are:

1. Where is the spiritual in abstract art? Introduced by Annalisa Burello
2. Does music create a spiritual space in health and wellbeing? Introduced by Prof June Boyce-Tillman
3. Techno-Spiritual Horizons: In what ways do technological art forms express or invoke spiritual experience? Introduced by Dr Lila Moore

After the presentations, we will open to the floor for a moderated discussion.

Please register for the event using the button above. During registration, you will have the option to write some words about the grounding of your interest in the the topic, which you can choose to include in the attendees list shared on the members-only SASIG page on the INSS website. You'll be able to edit this statement at any time on your website profile, or when registering for other SASIG events.