Christian Suhr

Profile

Christian Suhr is a filmmaker and professor of visual and multimodal anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the PI of the ERC project: "Heart Openings: The Experience and Cultivation of Love in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam" (2021-27). 

His recent film "Light upon light" (Suhr and Lotfy 2022) explores experiences of luminosity and love among Sufi communities in post-revolutionary Egypt. He is also the author of the award-winning film and book "Descending with angels" (Manchester University Press 2019) about jinn possession, Islamic exorcism, and psychiatry.

Based on fieldwork on Baluan Island, Papua New Guenea, he directed the three films "On behalf of the Living" (with Ton Otto and Gary Kildea, 2023), "Unity through culture" (with Ton Otto, DER 2011), and "Ngat is dead" (with Ton Otto and Steffen Dalsgaard, DER 2009). "Epoche" (with Claire Petitmengin, Mind & Life Europe, forthcoming) is a film exploring the use of micro-phenomenology in the study of meditative experience.

Suhr’s edited work includes the books "Transcultural montage" (Berghahn 2013), "When the media sets the agenda" (DJØF 2021), and the special journal issues: "Al-Ghayb: The poetics and politics of the unseen in Islam" (Contemporary Islam 13.1, 2019); "Anthropology and media" (Jordens Folk 54, 2019); "Camera as cultural critique" (Journal of Visual Anthropology 31.4, 2018).

In 2014, Suhr founded the Visual and Multimodal Anthropology Lab at Moesgaard. He was the coordinator of the MSc programme in Visual Anthropology at AU between 2014-23 until he took on a full time research position in the Heart Openings project. From 2018-23, Suhr served as elected member of the Young Academy under the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.