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13 March 2019 Artist Shona Illingworth, In Cooperation with London-Based Art Institution “ The Wapping Project” and the British Council, Presents Look up at the Sky art series programs
Artist Shona Illingworth,  In Cooperation with London-Based Art Institution “ The Wapping Project” and the British Council, Presents Look up at the Sky art series programs

 

Bahrain National Museum hosted,  on 12 March 2019,  a lecture on “ Exploring Individual & Cultural Amnesia” by Danish/Scottish artist  Shona Illingworth. This lecture is part of Shona Illingworth’s residency, supported by Bahrain Authority for Culture & Antiquities (BACA), in cooperation with “The Wapping Project” and the British Council.

The forum was attended by H.E Shaikha Hala Bint Mohammed Al Khalifa, Director General of the Culture and Arts Directorate, at BACA, H.E Shaikh Khalifa bin Ahmed bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, the  Director of Archeology & Museums’ department  at BACA, as well as lovers of culture in Bahrain.

During the forum artist  Shona Illingworth presented her personal point of view and discussed  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. Lesions in the Landscape by UK/Danish artist Shona Illingworth is a powerful new multi-screen installation, exploring the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory. Revealing the devastating effects of amnesia on one woman and the striking parallels with the sudden evacuation of the inhabitants of St Kilda in the North Atlantic in 1930, the work examines the profound effect and wider implications of memory loss on identity, space and the capacity to imagine the future.

Through her long-term collaboration with Conway, Illingworth was introduced to Claire, who at the age of forty-four experienced a severe case of viral encephalitis that left her with a large lesion on the right side of her brain. This caused extensive amnesia, erasing Claire’s memories of her family and much of her past, and compromising her ability to form new long-term memories. Claire’s story resonated with the research that Illingworth had already carried out on the history of the Outer Hebridean island of St Kilda, the population of which was suddenly evacuated in 1930 – an event that ended over 4,000 years of continuous human habitation on the remote archipelago. Illingworth saw striking parallels between Claire’s very personal, individual experience of amnesia and the ‘historical lesions in the physical and cultural landscape of St Kilda’.

It is these two seemingly disparate narratives that Illingworth brings together in a 35-minute film that begins with footage of gannets circling around St Kilda while a voice-over explains the history of the island’s inhabitants and their evacuation in 1930. The sound design that accompanies the opening sequence mixes the screeching of the birds with other sounds from the natural environment and sustained musical notes, manipulated in such a way that they take on an eerie, discordant quality, hinting at the sinister themes to come.

Worth to mention that 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 second public discussion “Sky Forum” event will be on 22 March 2019, 3:30pm at Qala’at al Bahrain Site Museum Bahrain, and it will be 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.

Shona Illingworth’s final series of workshops for children “Imagining Sky” will explore 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.
Shona Illingworth is a Danish/Scottish artist who works across a range of mediums, including sound, film, video, photography and drawing. She creates immersive video and multi-channel sound installations, exploring memory and situations of social tension and trauma. Artist Shona art work has been exhibited worldwide and she has been awarded greatest distinction prizes internationally.  
 Worth mentioning also that Topologies of Air, is  commissioned by “The Wapping Project”, while the exhibition at Bahrain National Museum and the accompanying public programmes are generously supported by the British Council, DCMS and 2017 GREAT through the UK-Gulf Culture and sport programme. The aim is  to improve soft and technical skills for talented individuals that would like to work in film, museums, festivals, music, live events, fashion, visual arts, performing arts, literature and design.