Still Point is a film installation by artist Suki Chan that engages with sacred spaces and places of pilgrimage.
It transports the audience from the site of the humble wooden structures offering refuge along Pilgrims’ Way to Holy Island in Northumberland, to contested sacred sites in Jerusalem, and the interior spaces of abandoned Syrian villages in the Golan Heights.
The film evokes the tension that marks them as places of refuge and spiritual quest – and as materially contested sites. The shifting of allegiances – changing cultural and religious identities, the resulting layering over time, the visual clues left behind – are physically embodied in the locations Chan chose to film. Barriers and divisions are a recurring motif in Still Point, suggesting the contradictory beliefs of organised religion – inclusivity and its often-inevitable consequence – exclusivity.
Still Point is part of Lindisfarne Gospels 2022 – a programme of events inspired by the display of the Lindisfarne Gospels in the North East in autumn 2022.