Shona Illingworth - The Airspace Tribunal and Topologies of Air

Описание: The Airspace Tribunal and Topologies of Air: Art and Human Rights - Visualising Threat

Abstract
Airspace and outer space are being rapidly transformed into an ever more complex and instrumentalised space of military and corporate exploitation, with increasingly pervasive and weaponised surveillance, inexorable expansion in aerial warfare, the deployment of unaccountable AI systems in lethal autonomous weapons, growing nuclear threat and unrelenting environmental degradation. This is subjecting global populations to new and complex forms of mass vulnerability and risk. However, the contemporary legal framework does not adequately protect people from these expanding airborne threats. This is also causing long-term, transgenerational trauma and psychological harm. Shona Illingworth will discuss her ongoing work on the Airspace Tribunal, an international people’s tribunal that she established with human rights lawyer Nick Grief in 2018 to consider the case for and against a proposed new human right to live without physical or psychological threat from above, and her interconnected body of artwork, Topologies of Air. She will explore how creative art practices can make visible and critically address the rapid transformation of airspace and outer space and the human and environmental impacts and discuss how the Airspace Tribunal challenges the traditional state-centric view of how international law is created through its collaborative work to develop the human rights dimension of airspace and outer space.

Bio
Shona Illingworth is a Danish-Scottish artist based in London, UK and a Professor of Art, Film and Media at the University of Kent. Informed by her long-term investigations into the dynamic processes of memory, amnesia and cultural erasure, her work examines the devastating impact of accelerating military, industrial and environmental transformations of airspace and outer space and the implications for human rights. She is co-founder of the Airspace Tribunal with human rights lawyer Nick Grief. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Topologies of Air at Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2025); Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie, Toulouse (2022-23), Bahrain National Museum, Manama (2022) and The Power Plant, Toronto (2022). 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, Artist Fellow for the UKRI Polarities Network and sits on the international editorial boards of Digital War and Memory, Mind and Media. Topologies of Air – Shona Illingworth, Downey, A. (ed) was published by Sternberg Press and the Power Plant in 2022.

Chair: Emanuel Tandler

Discover more: https://aerialspatialrevolution.ch/