Moving Pictures explores how migrant faith communities across England transform former cinemas into active spaces of worship and collective gathering. Since 2025, an ongoing residency at Kent Sri Swarna Dhurgai Amman Temple, housed within the former Kings Theatre in Ramsgate, has explored the relationship between devotional practice, belonging and public space. While worship ordinarily takes place within the temple, the residency centred on the 2026 Chariot and Water Festival, a rare moment in which the congregation's ritual life extended beyond the former cinema and into the town itself as the temple's deities processed through Ramsgate and onwards to the seafront.
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Within Hindu traditions, festival processions enable deities to leave the temple and enter the public realm, extending blessings and creating opportunities for wider communities to encounter and participate in ritual life. Accompanied by nadaswaram and tavil, prayer, devotional offerings and the rhythmic movement of the chariot itself, familiar streets become temporary spaces of collective worship and celebration. As one of the first Hindu chariot processions of its kind to take place in the UK, and the first ever to be held in Ramsgate, the festival marks a rare moment in which devotional life extends beyond the temple, inviting new encounters between congregation, town and seafront.
Moving Pictures responds to the material, environmental and devotional conditions of the site and its festival practices. The movement of the procession through the town, ritual action and the shifting conditions of the tide all shape how the moving image work emerges. Drawing on collaboratively produced films developed through ongoing dialogue with the temple community, the project re-presents the festival through site-specific screenings and moments of collective reflection across Ramsgate. At the shoreline, reprojection enables an encounter that the ritual itself cannot accommodate. Although the deities are carried to the water's edge, devotees are not permitted to accompany them into the sea. Through moving image, waves wash across their projected forms, momentarily dissolving and reconstituting them through light, tide and reflection. Reprojection therefore becomes more than an act of return. Rather than reproducing the festival, it extends its conditions of encounter, creating a performative experience attentive to the social, environmental and devotional worlds through which ritual life unfolds.
This work forms part of the wider research project, Moving Pictures: Reusing Cinemas as Places of Worship in the Diaspora. Further project material can be found at moving-pictures.info.
