Aesthetics of the religious encounter. To the sources. An interreligious speaking, listening, singing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, feeling, thinking, sensing. Vedas Torah Tripitaka Bible Koran Science & Art.
Kunstplanbau (KPB) has established a meeting place - a floating area - for religion, art and science. KPB interprets this floating area as a complementary model for the future that contributes to the blossoming of interreligious, intercultural and interdisciplinary dialog. Since 2012, the event series "Aesthetics of Religious Encounters" has focused on the phenomenon and mystery of human perception with regard to religion. Each year, the focus is on a sensory organ or faculty that connects people with the world. On the one hand, this involves the description, visualization and exploration of individual religious, aesthetic and artistic experiences, but on the other hand, it is about connecting these experiences in an interreligious dialogue. The project is thus not only committed to its subject matter, but also places the current social and political necessity of multi-religious coexistence at the center of consideration.
The annual themes of the series were: 2024 Women. Upstream Women. 2023 Keeping & Letting Go. 2022 Spirituality Playing God. 2021 Spirituality Healing Art. 2020 Spirituality Feeling. 2019 Spirit Thinking. 2018 Heart Feeling. 2017 Smell Smelling. 2016 Food Taste . 2015 Body Touching. 2014 Picture Seeing. 2013 Sound Hearing. 2012 Word Speaking.
2025 THE HUM OF THE PARTS. Interreligious and transcultural dialogs as a nomadic cultural project
The title is a play on words. It takes up Aristotle‘s well-known insight that the whole is more than the sum of its parts - and interweaves it with the hum, the sound of peoples of small creatures, which we will soon no longer hear if we do not find our way back to a wise form of human living by moving forward. The series of events brings religion, art and science, with their respective inner diversity and their ever-present connections, into conversation, experience and action. The voices of those who are often powerfully overheard are particularly emphasized: Women, the global South, the people who have never stopped living sustainably. In the same way, animals and plants, the planet Earth and its atmosphere, the water and all the different earths on the surface of the planet are parts of the complex ecosystem that can only survive as a whole and enable us to survive. Religious teachings and practices have, from time immemorial, encouraged respect for the interconnectedness of the whole; forms of art have illustrated it and given it symbolic thought; science, in the best of its searches, has repeatedly reoriented itself from the details to the whole. The aim is to pass on the insights of pioneers of networked thinking to the younger generation of 18 to 30-year-olds and to allow the younger generation to find their own position. The aim is to use new forms of resonance to bring the culture of respectful and peaceful interaction between people of different religious and cultural back-grounds into contact with people who have so far shied away from crossing paths with those who live differently. To this end, the encounters in Berlin‘s urban space will be meaningfully combined with virtual formats in social media, particularly via images and videos.
Reihe April - Oktober an der Theologischen Fakultät der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, St. Matthäus-Kirche am Kulturforum und im Stadtraum.
Renowned religious scholars, artists and scientists took part. They came from Afghanistan, Brazil, Chile, Germany, England, France, Finland, Greece, India, Italy, Iran, Israel, Japan, the Caribbean, Kenya, Cuba, Korea, Macedonia, Nigeria, Austria, Palestine, Pakistan, Russia, Scotland, Switzerland, Senegal, Serbia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Syria, Czechoslovakia, Turkey and Ukraine.
