The Power Plant

In collaboration with the Writers Collective of Canada, The Power Plant presents a series of free exploratory writing workshops. WCC celebrates each and every voice, welcoming writers of all levels. Trained volunteer facilitators lead the workshops and create a brave space to connect through story.

In this online Writing Workshop, participants will respond to visual prompts inspired by Shona Illingworth's exhibition Topologies of Air, currently on exhibit at The Power Plant. In this creative session you will be invited to share your writing and will receive positive feedback from their peers.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

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 potential 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.