Nanaksar Gurdwara Gursikh Temple (NGGT)
Kent Thanet Tamil Association
Historic England
FundingRoyal Institute for British Architects (RIBA) 2022 Research Grant
Related Events
RAI Film Festival & Conference 2025 London Migration Film Festival 2024
Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art 2025
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RAI Film Festival & Conference 2025 London Migration Film Festival 2024
Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art 2025
Moving Pictures is a practice-led research project examining how migrant and diaspora faith communities across England adapt disused cinemas into active places of worship and how these transformations reshape heritage, belonging, and everyday religious practice. As part of the research, a national survey and open database mapping 101 former cinemas now functioning as churches, mosques, gurdwaras, temples, and other faith centres was led by architectural historian Kate Jordan. This survey establishes the scale of a widespread yet under-recognised phenomenon and provides an empirical foundation for the project’s site-based research.
Building on the Site-Integrity methodology, the project works collaboratively with congregations to represent their practices from an emic perspective. Drawing inspiration from the cinematograph—an early device for recording and projecting moving images—it employs a custom-built filming and projection system calibrated to the dimensions and movement of each site. By replacing the camera with a projector of matching focal length, filmed ceremonies align with the architecture at a 1:1 scale. As the projector retraces the camera’s path, image, sound, and building are synchronised, allowing filmed ritual and lived environment to coexist. Through these co-created, site-specific installations, filmmaking operates as a performative mode of enquiry, attending not only to architectural change but to the sensory and ritual practices through which sacred space is continually produced. The focus shifts from buildings as static heritage objects to space as something made and remade through ceremony, movement, and everyday use, making visible forms of lived heritage often overlooked within conventional frameworks.
Building on the Site-Integrity methodology, the project works collaboratively with congregations to represent their practices from an emic perspective. Drawing inspiration from the cinematograph—an early device for recording and projecting moving images—it employs a custom-built filming and projection system calibrated to the dimensions and movement of each site. By replacing the camera with a projector of matching focal length, filmed ceremonies align with the architecture at a 1:1 scale. As the projector retraces the camera’s path, image, sound, and building are synchronised, allowing filmed ritual and lived environment to coexist. Through these co-created, site-specific installations, filmmaking operates as a performative mode of enquiry, attending not only to architectural change but to the sensory and ritual practices through which sacred space is continually produced. The focus shifts from buildings as static heritage objects to space as something made and remade through ceremony, movement, and everyday use, making visible forms of lived heritage often overlooked within conventional frameworks.
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Research residencies at the Zoroastrian Centre for Europe in London (former Grosvenor Cinema), Nanaksar Gurdwara Gursikh Temple in Coventry (former Redesdale Cinema), and Kent Sri Swarna Dhurgai Amman Temple in Ramsgate (former Kings Theatre) function as both research environments and public forums. By situating the work within the sites themselves, the project enables residents, heritage professionals, local authorities, and community stakeholders to experience these transformations directly and participate in structured dialogue. These gatherings recognise faith communities as knowledge holders and collaborators rather than consultees, supporting more equitable forms of heritage decision-making.
Together, these processes generate situated insight into how diaspora groups reactivate historic buildings, sustain cultural identity, and create new forms of belonging.
Moving Pictures establishes a transferable model for how historic buildings can remain protected while being meaningfully reactivated by contemporary communities, providing an evidence base to inform more inclusive heritage policy and practice grounded in lived experience, plurality, and social value.
Moving Pictures establishes a transferable model for how historic buildings can remain protected while being meaningfully reactivated by contemporary communities, providing an evidence base to inform more inclusive heritage policy and practice grounded in lived experience, plurality, and social value.