Ingrid Koenig’s Vancouver based studio practice traverses the fields of theoretical physics, social history, and narratives of science through visual art and relational projects. Koenig is Artist in Residence (until 2021) at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre and co-organizes processes of collaboration between artists and physicists. She is inspired by the possibilities of co-thought as a way to navigate complex phenomena and to hold different ways of knowing in relationship to each other.
Koenig has exhibited her drawings and paintings in public galleries across Canada, in Europe, and New Zealand. She is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council and Goethe Institute, as well as the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the project Leaning Out of Windows – Art and Physics Collaborations Through Aesthetic Transformations (2016-2020), co-awarded with artist collaborator Randy Lee Cutler. This project explores how artists might work with scientists to develop a shared understanding of how knowledge can be translated across their disciplinary communities.
Koenig earned her MFA at NSCAD, Halifax. She is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, situated on the unceded Coast Salish territories. Her pedagogical designs involve courses that intersect science, humanities and visual art. She has presented this research-based practice through conferences and artist talks in Canada, Germany and the U.S. and published a related article on her partnership with a physics lab in MIT’s journal Leonardo.
In 2019 she was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant to join the Arctic Circle art and science residency in the international territory of Svalbard. During this expedition she examined theories of temporality across a spectrum of perceptions from physics-based and biological, to geophysical and social historical, to draw out a visual essay as scientific reverie on spacetime.