Secular Devotions: Ritual, Addiction and Religion in the Everyday

Ever wonder how everyday phenomena and addictions in secular culture relate to religious ritual?

Has our culture moved on from religious rituals, or do they manifest in other forms?

Join an SF Art Forum lecture exploring how problematic and addictive phenomena, such as smoking, can point to a desire for the religious, the mystical, and transcendent, missing in our secular, disenchanted culture.

Nathalia Bell, artist-scholar, will host a lecture featuring some of her films and her recent publication on smoking in film and its religious significations. Don’t miss this thought-provoking lecture on secular devotions, which explores the impulse for sacrifice not only in the church, but also in pop culture, the sublime in the profane, such as with smoking and in films, which act as contemporary forms of stained glass windows.

Bell’s films create ruminative spaces that juxtapose the sublime and profane. She is fascinated by ancient religious practices such as creating altars and spaces for rituals, and believes these dynamics continue even in our secular age in pop culture, the absurd and mundane, all manifesting our human condition. Seeing film as stained glass devotions, she traces these ancient religious impulses in found-footage poetic essays. Bell’s recent project, Ziggurettes, revolves around exploring the spiritual resonances of smoking, as a type of temple burnt offering, and a secular equivalent to mindfulness breathing; a bizarre phenomenon where we play with our breath. She recently published an article about this project in the UBC film journal Cinephile and presented on it at several conferences, ranging from film philosophy to mysticism.