Sep 14 – Nov 17, 2019
OPENING: 13 SEPTEMBER, 7 PM

Shannon Bool examines the meaning of the gaze. To this end, she pursues a polymorphous artistic practice that encompasses tapestries, carpets, photograms, sculptures, installations, and paintings. She combines fine art media with techniques and materials that are usually relegated to the margins of art history and often considered more artisanal than artistic: elaborately woven large-format tapestries and silkscreen prints embroidered with fine cotton threads in order to emphasize details or create a supplementary visual layer. These processes—traditionally associated with female labor— suggest a feminist approach that opposes the predominant modes of reception.

In her works, Shannon Bool combines associative elaborations on a formal level with astute research, which often revolves around social, art-historical, or architectural phenomena. Inspired by psychoanalyses, she probes the unconscious, which weaves itself like a thread through the exhibition House of Oblivion. In her investigations on Carlo Mollino, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and a series of new works, where stock photos of horses are superimposed with architecture, Shannon Bool looks into modernism and the ideologies that emerge from it. Shannon Bool thus subverts (art) history and questions our deeply engrained ways of seeing.

Shannon Bool (*1972 in Comox, British Columbia, lives in Berlin) studied at the Städelschule Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt/Main. Her first solo exhibitions took place at the Bonner Kunstverein (2012), the GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen (2010) and at the Centre Rhénan d’Art Contemporain Alsace, Altkirch, France (2010). Her work can be found a. o. in the collections of Metropolitan Museum NY and the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt.

The exhibition of Shannon Bool was initiated by the Museé d’art Joliette in Québec, Canada, and is a cooperation between the Museé d’art Joliette (2018), the Centre Culturel Canadien in Paris (2019), Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Canada (2020) and the Kunstverein Braunschweig. The version of House of Oblivion presented in Braunschweig counts as the artist’s most extensive exhibition to date.

A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

GUESTROOM: Esther Kinsky

Invited by Shannon Bool Esther Kinsky exhibits in the Villa Salve Hospes room that was originally used as a guest room.

Curator: Dr. Jule Hillgärtner

Assistant Curator: Raoul Klooker

The exhibition House of Oblivion has been made possible by:
Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur
Stiftung Niedersachsen
Botschaft von Kanada

The Kunstverein Braunschweig e.V. is supported by:
Stadt Braunschweig, Kulturinstitut

Kunstverein Braunschweig e.V.
Lessingplatz 12
38100 Braunschweig

Tue – Sun
11 am – 5 pm
Thu
11 am – 8 pm