“Spirituality and the Arts” conference at Harvard Divinity School

From April 23–26, 2025, the transdisciplinary conference Spirituality and the Arts, hosted by Harvard’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality, brought together scholars, spiritual practitioners, artists, and performers to explore how spirituality manifests through artistic expression. We were glad to present the findings of our ongoing research on the relationship between alternative spirituality and artistic modernism in socialist Central and Eastern Europe.

In our presentation entitled Enchanted Socialist Modernity. Imagining Spiritual (in) Art History of Central and Eastern Europe, we begin with the observation that since the onset of the 21st century, we have been witnessing a “spiritual turn,” marked by a rapidly growing interest in the connections between contemporary art and spirituality. This turn has been manifested in the proliferation of exhibitions, academic events, and publications. Research into alternative spiritualities occupies a special place in these initiatives. We found it curious, however, why so few research into the relationship between art and spirituality consider the art of Central and Eastern Europe. While we could observe that most of the authors writing about art consistently reject Weber’s paradigm of “disenchantment,” agreeing that there is a close connection between new expressions of spirituality and modernity, they per definitionem equate the latter with “the West,” i.e., with the logic of the development of Western democracies and liberal capitalism. Hence, we found it necessary to complicate the relationship between artistic modernism, modernity, and spirituality and to situate it within the specific historical, geopolitical, and ideological context of the Central and Eastern European countries under state-socialism, within the symbolic timeframe marked by the end of the Second World War and the fall of communism. Research are showing that religious practices in countries under Communism did not so much disappear as they transformed, with much of religious life shifting from the public sphere to the private, taking on the form of non-institutional “lived” or “domesticated” religion. This was even more pronounced in the case of alternative spiritualities, ranging from esoteric traditions to New Age movement, so the fundamental question arises: how to study the relationship between art and spirituality which developed under such circumstances?

Our aim was to demonstrate how case studies can contribute to changing existing beliefs about the (alternative) spiritual geography of art in Central and Eastern Europe under state socialism. Given the anthropological turn in the humanities, we focused primarily on acting subjects, wondering about “alternative spiritual artistic networks” created by “spiritual seekers”. And, last but not least, we sought to present our assumptions on how the study of the relationship between art and spirituality in Central and Eastern Europe can contribute to the practice of art history today.

If you’d like to learn more, all program events were recorded and can be watched at the following link:

https://pes.hds.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum4701/files/2025-04/2025_Spirituality-and-the-Arts_PES-Conference_Schedule_6.pdf