Airspace Tribunal: Gathering of Makers with Shona Illingworth

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The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is delighted to announce a dynamic program of events to celebrate the closing week of its Winter 2022 Season. In this special session of the Airspace Tribunal: Gathering of Makers, the Danish Scottish artist Shona Illingworth will be present.  Together with the Fellows at The Power Plant, Jacqueline Kok and Joséphine Denis, Illingworth 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 this gathering will be integrated into 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.