City Stories: Common Ground
Lens Lab Project spent a year and a half working closely with communities from six of the most represented faiths in our city, gathering stories and capturing portraits of people and place through photography within these thriving communities. City Stories: Common Ground brings together the result of conversations and image-making, revealing the extraordinary diversity of everyday lives within the heart of our city’s communities.
City Stories: Common Ground was held at Mill Hill Chapel inside The Priestly Hall, and brought together a cross-section of activities, images, sound works and conversations as an exhibition and programme. Held within the historic building of project partner Mill Hill Chapel, it offered the public a chance to connect to a vast body of engaging work built through this process.
Leeds is a city of over 170 languages and multiple faiths; in 2022, it was revealed that the UK was no longer a majority-Christian country. Lens Lab set out to connect to these communities by making sound and image work across an 18-month process reflecting their commonalities and differences. Alongside their primary purpose of worship, the spaces they occupy allow communities to come together in shared activities: weddings, funerals, religious festivals and celebrations, teaching, rites of passage, and the sharing of food.
Hundreds of years of history have shaped these spaces, the past etched into the wood of the floorboards. Each scuff, mark and scratch is a form of another’s presence. We pass by these spaces every day, without really thinking of them. We imagine we know what is inside, to already be familiar with something so close to us. The Mosque, the Synagogue, the Church - places like these become almost abstract without direct interaction. But spaces like these are what communities are built upon and bloom. City Stories: Common Ground looks at the traces formed in these moments and the rich tapestries that are interwoven by their history.
City Stories: Common Ground was made possible thanks to project partner Mill Hill Chapel and funders Leeds2023 and the National Lottery Heritage Fund.