Setting the Table Anew: Queering the Lord’s Supper in Contemporary Art

Abstract

Mariecke van den Berg presents a case study of the possibilities for not merely accommodating the LGBTQ+ community within mainstream churches but of queering theological beliefs and liturgical practices (‘Setting the Table Anew: Queering the Lord’s Supper in Contemporary Art’). She explores the queer potential of the exhibition Ecce Homo (1998)—and in particular the work The Last Supper—by Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson. Van den Berg investigates the queer potential of The Last Supper by bringing into dialogue the ‘ordinary theology’ of the participants in the debate and queer theological insights that were developed in the two decades since the exhibition was first shown.

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under Grant 327-25-004 and is part of the research project ‘Contested Privates: The Oppositional Pairing of Religion and Homosexuality in Contemporary Public Discourse in the Netherlands’ (Amsterdam Center for the Study of Lived Religion and Utrecht Chair of Religion and Gender). The author wishes to thank Elisabeth Ohlson for the use of her photographs, and the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Rights (RFSL) for the use of its press archive.