Seeing relations through art: exhibition & laboratory

For this exercise in contemplative seeing, artworks organised in pairs juxtapose past and contemporary creators. Sometimes explicitly sacred, sometimes not. 

Curator Professor Yvonne zu Dohna-Schlohbitten describes the practice of seeing-through-art as a move away from understanding art both as an object of consumption and as a source of purely aesthetic experience. Artworks turn into channels that enable the observer to see different and complex relations enshrined in a piece: the actual image represented, the choice of colours, the biographical events that influenced the author, the historical period within which the artwork was created, the cultural references of the epoch, the philosophical or political leanings of the author, the emotional impact on the observer, their own biographical experience, the memories it triggers, and so on. 

The viewer is not simply “admiring” an image or “feeling moved” by it: the path of contemplative seeing practice ultimately frees minds, souls. and hearts so that we open ourselves to the piece of art that is in front of us and eventually we can let ourselves be seen from a new lens. Some may even experience this as (a memory of) an encounter with the sacred. 

Through this act of contemplation individual observers let themselves be seen by the artwork, go through a process of metanoia (the classical Greek term commonly used in Christian contexts, referring to transformation in the sense of change of heart, con-versio in Latin), and thus strive to see the “unavailable”. 

This “knowledge of the not yet known” connects with the ideas of “genius”, used in art history, of “grace” in theology, of the “unconsciousness” in psychology. 

This new type of knowledge enables participants to develop a Weltanschauung (German for “view of the world”), which is inclusive. It should not be described as “holistic” seeing, because the elements that are seen exist side by side, in equal terms, and are neither mixed up into a blurred entity nor divided. Reaching this contemplative knowledge we can recognize one in the other: the observer does not focus on the individual components and forces (visible or invisible) of the artworks, nor at the ideas that drove them. Instead, they are encouraged, through contemplation, to capture the “whole” of the artwork. 

Each component is not in a “contradiction” (German: Widerspruch) with the other, but in a “counterpoint” relation. They are not dissolved into one single vision or idea but remain “in tension” with each other. They exist “within” each other. 

Background to this event

With guest speaker and curator Yvonne zu Dohna-Schlohbitten (Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome) we make an experimental visit to a pop-up art exhibition to experience seeing relations through art. 

This approach began in 2009 with the multidisciplinary initiative Threefold Seeing, part of the ChiesArte programme—how to look at contemporary art in churches. A number of initiatives followed, including, in 2016, spiritual exercises and a major exhibition at the Vatican Museums on the Battle of Jacob as a paradigm of artistic creation. 

Since then, Prof Dohna-Schlohbitten has been working with the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Centro Alberto Hurtado, and six other universities on follow-up initiatives addressing notions of “oppositions”, knowledge, new forms of intelligence, and knowledge of contemporary art, inspired by Romano Guardini. 

The itinerant exhibition element of this project was launched in 2025 within an ecumenical Christian setting. It marked the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. The exhibition has been displayed at the Gregorian University and at the Chapel for Europe in Brussels (a centre for ecumenical activities). It is also due to form part of a training programme at the University of Salzburg .

About the curator

Yvonne zu Dohna-Schlobitten is Professor of History, Philosophy and Spirituality of Art and Culture at the Pontifical Gregorian University, where she teaches in the new Catholic Studies program. She is a cross-disciplinary scholar with a background that encompasses philosophy, theology, law, art history, and politics.  

After studying jurisprudence, sciences of art and the philosophy of media, she was a Max Planck fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. There she earned an interdisciplinary PhD in philosophy with Prof H Belting, in Canova and the origin of cultural heritage. She specializes in International and comparative law (CTL, Genf), philosophy of religion (Freiburg University) and spiritual theology (Teresianum, Rome). She has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM) in Mexico.

Her field of research is silence and the epistemology and phenomenology of seeing. She has been collaborating for several years on Romano Guardini with the Catholic University of America’s McLean Center for the Study of Cultures and Values. This includes a recent joint project on The Ascesis of thinking for art: Socrates, Buddha, and Christ, with the patronage of the Rome Catholic Studies Program.  

She is a member of the editorial board of Donne Chiesa Mondo of the Osservatore Romano, vice president of the Centro di Formazione alla Meditazione Cristiana (CFMC) in Rome. 

Yvonne leads the Intercultural School of Silence (ISS), founded at the Centre of Formation to the Christian Meditation in 2023 and hosted at the Franciscan Church of San Giacomo alla Lungara in Rome. She is a spiritual guide of silence in the interreligious context with courses in China. In 2022, she received for her Opera Omnia the award of the Premio Basilicata di Letteratura Spirituale e Poesia Religiosa. 

Her latest books are Verso nuovi occhi. L'arte dello sguardo sul tutto (Cittadella, 2023, Towards new eyes: the art of seeing on the whole) and Invocata redenzione: La Crocifissione di Picasso (Ancora, 2024, coauthored with Missaglia and Osto; Invoked redemption: Picasso’s Crucifixion).