Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience

Imaging Pilgrimage is a groundbreaking book that explores contemporary art created after pilgrimages and its role in embodied experience. It won awards from the American Academy of Religion and the Borsch-Rast Book Prize & Lectureship and was selected as an Oxford Alumni Book of the Month. The book brings various fields into conversation and offers multiple lenses and theoretical approaches to engage objects as radical sites of encounter. It is essential reading for anyone interested in pilgrimage studies, material culture, and the place of religion within contemporary art.

Format: Hardback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 26 August 2021
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Shortlisted for the American Academy of Religion's Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion - Constructive-Reflective Studies, Winner of the American Academy of Religion's Religion and the Arts Book Award, and Winner of the Borsch-Rast Book Prize & Lectureship, An Oxford Alumni Book of the Month pick, Imaging Pilgrimage explores contemporary art that is created after a pilgrimage and intended to act as a catalyst for the embodied experience of others. Each chapter focuses on a contemporary artwork that links one landscape to another, from the Spanish Camino to a backyard in the Pacific Northwest, from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, and from Ecuador to California. The close attention to context and experience allows for popular practices like the making of third-class or contact relics to augment conversations about the authenticity or perceived power of a replica or copy, and it also challenges the tendency to think of the "original" in hierarchical terms. The book brings various fields into conversation by offering a number of lenses and theoretical approaches (materialist, kinesthetic, haptic, synesthetic) that engage objects as radical sites of encounter, activated through religious and ritual praxis, and negotiated with not just the eyes, but a multiplicity of senses. The first full-length study to engage contemporary art that has emerged out of the embodied experience of pilgrimage, Imaging Pilgrimage is an important and timely addition to the field of material and visual culture of religion. It is essential reading for anyone interested in pilgrimage studies, material culture, and the relationship between the two.

Weight: 758g
Dimension: 160 x 241 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501335013