Lived Bodies

Shannon Bool´s works are based on the appropriation and combination of stories and production techniques of the most various cultures. By extracting materials and motifs from their original contexts, she develops a subversive perception of culture. The exhibition “Lived Bodies” originated in research conducted on the methodological beginnings of psychoanalysis in the 1920s and the role of the interiors of Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s consulting rooms. Archaic artefacts and ornamental carpets from distant cultures had the function of activating the unconscious in order to reach hidden areas of the psyche. Bool’s new paintings, tapestries, photograms, and objects made of Carrara marble play with the complex interrelations between inner and outer reality and break open the originally “assumed truths”. The body becomes the central “area of the images”. The title, “Lived Bodies”, is derived from the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, according to whom reality results from a concrete bodily experience in space. Merleau-Ponty describes an “interweaving of world and body”. The body is at once a part of reality and its constructor.

Shannon Bool´s works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum New York, the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt and The National Gallery of Canada, among others. She has become known to an international audience through solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver, GAK Bremen or the Bonner Kunstverein. Works of her current series will be on view in the show "Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection" at the Metropolitan Museum New York opening in mid-September.