Airspace Tribunal: Gathering of Makers with Shona Illingworth

In this special session of the Airspace Tribunal: Gathering of Makers, the artist Shona Illingworth will be present. The Fellows at The Power Plant, Jacqueline Kok and Joséphine Denis, as well as the artist Shona Illingworth herself will facilitate this roundtable conversation and expand the topics discussed in the Airspace Tribunal, focusing on the cultural and cosmological understanding of the skies. The feedback from these gatherings will be integrated in the ongoing Airspace Tribunal’s artistic research.

In her first major solo exhibition in Canada, Shona Illingworth presents works that explore how space is occupied today. She probes how current modes of governance, surveillance, and weaponization are invading our interior worlds and transcending the borders of nation-states to create new frameworks of dominance and colonization. Lesions in the Landscape, an immersive video and sound installation, examines the complex individual and societal impacts of memory and cultural erasure; works in a variety of mediums constituting an “Amnesia Museum,” exploring how memory and forgetting intermingle; and, Topologies of Air, a video installation, is expanded for its Toronto debut, surveying how humans have radically transformed the sky since the advent of modernity, turning it into a complex and multilayered space. Illingworth’s inquiry reveals emerging power relations and knowledge structures that determine the manner in which we inhabit the world, contemplating their potentially catastrophic impact on our co-existence and survival on this planet.
Shona Illingworth is a Danish-Scottish artist based in London, UK. Through her interdisciplinary research-based investigation of science, politics, and the human condition, Illingworth raises critical questions about the territorialization of both earth and sky while examining gaps in our collective consciousness. Recent solo exhibitions include the Bahrain National Museum, Manama (2020); UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2016); and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool (2015). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, London (2018-19); Imperial War Museum, London (2017-18); Museum of Modern Art, Bologna (2008); and Akbank Sanat, Istanbul (2006). Illingworth was a recipient of the Stanley Picker Fellowship and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2016). She is currently an Imperial War Museum Associate and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War.
Joséphine Denis was born in Haiti, raised between Port-au-Prince and New York. She is currently the TD Curator of Education and Outreach at the Power Plant in Tkaronto/Toronto. Denis is a curator and writer whose interests center on Black diasporic art and institutional transformations that reflect critical engagements of artists and public alike. Denis previously worked at Serpentine Galleries, London, UK; Faurschou Foundation, Beijing, China; and, Lehmann Maupin, New York, USA.
Jacqueline Kok is a curator based in Toronto and New York City. She is also presently the Nancy McCain & Bill Morneau Curatorial Fellow at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Kok’s curatorial research pursues the political and social potentials of space through a deep exploration of the dialectical relationship among the bodies within it. Kok previously worked at MOCO, Montpellier, France; e-flux, New York, USA; and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan.