Shannon Bool’s artistic work revolves around contextual shifts and transfers of meaning to which things are subjected between cultures and across different epochs. For example, she allows a traditional oriental carpet pattern from 15th century paintings to return to its place of origin when she sketches carpets depicted in medieval paintings and has them reworked into magnificent floor paintings by traditional Anatolian carpet weavers. A back and forth between times and cultures also results when Minimal Art and phallus forms, Pamela Anderson and Barnett Newman, striptease poles and transcendent symbolism come together in her stele objects.
At the evening Bar Faseliese celebrates, Shannon Bool and Janneke de Vries will talk about Bool’s exhibition “The Inverted Harem I” and approach some fundamental questions in the artist’s work. Among many other things, it will be necessary to clarify what connects oriental carpet patterns and English pubs, why medieval gate grids and Constantin Brancusi fit together well, how best to talk about art, what the western fantasy of a harem and the reality of the Orient have to do with each other, or why disappointment can create works of art.
Shannon Bool was born in 1972 in Comox, Canada. She studied literature and philosophy at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and Fine Arts at Cooper Union in New York and the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. She lives in Berlin. After numerous presentations in Germany and abroad, “The Inverted Harem I” is her first institutional exhibition in Germany at the GAK Gesellschaft für Kunst. “The Inverted Harem I” is a cooperation between the GAK, the CRAC Alsace in Altkirch and the Bonner Kunstverein.
A conversation to the exhibition “Shannon Bool. The Inverted Harem I”.