“Sacred Spaces With The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room” Exhibition

Rubin Museum of Art

[Image: David De Armas Photography]

This event has ended.

Across the globe people use ritual and spiritual practice to connect with worlds beyond their immediate experience. This iteration of Sacred Spaces is dedicated to a selection of these transcendent and devotional practices.

The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room re-creates an immersive sacred space in which visitors can encounter Himalayan art as it is used in practice. Spend a quiet moment in the Shrine Room installation and become vividly aware of how the art relates to the fundamental Buddhist acts of offering, prayer, contemplation, and devotion.

An acoustically treated listening room pays tribute to the work of the composer and musician Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), who pioneered the spiritual practice of Deep Listening. This practice is a form of meditation in which “attention is directed to the interplay of sounds and silences or the sound/silence continuum.” We invite you to learn about Deep Listening through self-directed exercises Oliveros titled Sonic Meditations or as participants in scheduled workshops led by certified instructors.

A mesmerizing video installation evokes the active sacred atmosphere of Shravanabelagola, India. The video by Deidi von Schaewen documents a ritual that takes place every twelve years, when practitioners of Jainism—an Indian religion with a strong focus on compassion and non-violence—bathe a massive, tenth-century stone sculpture in purifying substances.

Sacred Spaces is made possible by The Hoch 2009 Charitable Lead Trust and Rasika and Girish Reddy, as well as Bob and Lois Baylis, Ashwini and Anita Gupta, Preethi Krishna and Ram Sundaram, William and Pamela Michaelcheck, Tulku Tsultrim Pelgyi, Manoj and Rita Singh, Venkat and Pratima Srinivasan, the Zakaria Family Foundation, and contributors to the 2017 Exhibitions Fund.