Four Seasons in Faith, a captivating new exhibition that highlights the rich and diverse faith communities within the city has opened at the Museum of Edinburgh.
The exhibition has been shaped by Museums & Galleries Edinburgh’s 'Keep the Faith' project, which worked in collaboration with the Edinburgh Interfaith Association and faith groups from across Edinburgh to curate a collection that reflects how communities would like to see their celebrations of faith represented within the museum collection.
The showcases a wide array of objects donated and loaned by members of some of Edinburgh’s major world faith communities, offering visitors a unique insight into how people embody their faith in the city today. With the help of a group of community curators from different religious backgrounds, the exhibition tells the stories of these communities and explores how faith is celebrated throughout the year in Edinburgh.
Highlights of the exhibition include:
- a Buddhist prayer wheel from the Edinburgh Tibetan Buddhist Temple
- a pair of Shabbat candlesticks and a Kippah and Talitt belonging to a Jewish American immigrant now chair of the Edinburgh Interfaith Association
- a Muslim prayer mat brought from Pakistan to Edinburgh in the 1970s.
The exhibition also includes items that highlight the role of faith in the broader Edinburgh community, such as hand-drawn artwork created by members of a parents and toddlers group run by the Baha'i community and St James the Less Episcopal Church, as well as a knitted hat issued by the Mission to Seafarers in Leith, a charity supporting seafarers' mental health worldwide.
In addition to these more traditional items, the exhibition gives voice to lesser-known religious practices in the city. Visitors will discover objects used by the Heathens of Lothian in their rituals, as well as an exploration of how these practices influence Edinburgh's vibrant festival calendar, including events like Beltane and Samhain.
As part of its ongoing work with community curators, the Museum of Edinburgh will also be creating a short film documenting the diverse faith practices in the city today. This film will feature oral history interviews and inter-faith conversations recorded at various places of worship across Edinburgh, providing a vital addition to the Museum’s social history collections. The film will be showcased at the exhibition’s closing event and will be made available on the Museum's online channels.
Culture and Communities Convener Cllr Val Walker said:
Four Seasons in Faith is an important reflection of Edinburgh’s rich, diverse, and evolving cultural landscape, celebrating the faiths that shape the city’s identity and the people who practice them.
Visitors to the museum can learn all about the traditions, celebrations, and stories that shape Edinburgh’s spiritual landscape throughout the changing seasons. The exhibition is also accompanied by a programme of events led by our community curators and their community contacts which will be a vital addition to our social history collections and will give context to the existing faith collections and the new material we have collected throughout this project.