Public programmes accompanying Shona Illingworth’s residency with Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities

We are delighted to be presenting a series of public events in Bahrain with Scottish-Danish artist Shona Illingworth who is undertaking an artist residency with Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities developing her latest body of work Topologies of Air, commissioned by The Wapping Project, which will be exhibited alongside her previous major installation Lesions in the Landscape at the Bahrain National Museum from March 2020. The project is part of the British Council UK-Gulf Exhibition Programme.

Exploring Individual & Cultural Amnesia
Artist Talk by Shona Illingworth

12 March 2019, 6pm
Bahrain National Museum

Shona Illingworth will discuss her exploration of individual and cultural amnesia and how it shapes both our sense of place and how we imagine the future through the development of her major artworks Lesions in the Landscape and the Amnesia Museum. She will outline the process of developing these works and how they have been informed through her collaborations with leading scientific experts in human memory, cultural geographers, archaeologists and historians.

Sky Forum
Public discussion

22 March 2019, 3:30pm
Bahrain Fort Museum

A day of presentations and discussions bringing together scientists, archaeologists, historians and artists to consider the sky above our heads, and our past, present and future relationship to it. Sky Forum invites you to look up and consider the sky above our heads not as a void, free space, but a multi-layered, complex cultural and legal space, both shared and personal, with a long history and rapidly changing future. Sky Forum will provide significant contribution to Shona Illingworth’s installation Topologies of Air.

How the sky and our relationship to it has changed over time?
What does the future of the sky look like to you?
What do you consider are the main hopes and concerns regarding the future of the sky?

Speakers include:
Mahmood Al Shargawi, Air Traffic Controller/Visual Artist
Mohammed bin Nasser Al Khalifa, Urban Affairs/Aviation/Mass Transit
Steffen Laursen, Archeologist
Abdulaziz Mohammed, Botanist/Entomologist
Hasan Hujairi, Music Studies
Balqees Fakhro, Visual Artist/Art Historian
Giuse Maggi, Geologist/Visual Artist
Mayasa Al Sowaidi, Mathematician/Visual Artist
Ali Karimi, Architect

Imagining Sky
Workshops for children

20 March 2019, 4pm-7pm
Art Centre

21 March 2019, 4pm-7pm
Archeologies of Green Pavilion
Muhharaq

Shona Illingworth will also run a series of workshops with children exploring their ideas of sky through drawing, poetry, filmmaking and discussion. Working together they will share their own ideas about the sky in the present and how they imagine it might change in future.

Look up at the Sky public programmes are part of Shona Illingworth’s Topologies of Air commissioned by The Wapping Project, London. Shona Illingworth’s residency is supported by Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities. Topologies of Air will be exhibited at Bahrain National Museum in 2020 before touring to The Power Plant, Toronto, in 2021. The exhibition at Bahrain National Museum and the accompanying public programmes are generously supported by the British Council, DCMS and GREAT through the UK-Gulf Culture and sport programme.