’Faith began as a promise. But it became a border drawn across the human mind’, says Ukrainian activist and FEMEN icon Inna Shevchenko. She opens this year’s Republic of Gods with a performative speech that centres on the female body. For centuries, every major religion has regulated female desire, sanctified women’s obedience and criminalised their freedom. Demanding that the alliance between religion and power be broken, Shevchenko now proposes a new liturgical form with her State of Faith. As spoken monologues and sung appeals blend into a contemporary ritual, State of Faith is the bid for a reinvention of faith, reclaiming sanctity as a source of resistance. ‘If faith is to survive, it must stop kneeling before power and rise with those who refuse to kneel at all.’

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