Shannon Bool: Promiscuous Rooms

The Canadian Cultural Centre is pleased to present Shannon Bool’s first solo exhibition in France. Bool is an internationally recognized contemporary artist based in Berlin. Produced by the Musée d’art de Joliette, the exhibition is enriched in Paris by several new works co-produced with the Kunstverein Braunschweig, which will host the exhibition in the fall of 2019. Promiscuous Rooms reveals the underlying fantasmal character of modernist architecture, and the current relevance of this issue in a world where the image of an “exotic” female body remains powerfully seductive, but in more ambiguous ways.

Shannon Bool’s recent practice takes on many forms, including tapestries, silk paintings, collages, sculptures or photograms. Promiscuous Rooms foregrounds Bool’s current research on a series of erotic drawings made by Le Corbusier in Algeria during the 1930s. These coincided with the initial stages of the architect’s urban plan designs aimed at transforming Algiers into a modern imperial capital, thus asserting the French presence in North Africa. With her Bombshells series, Bool detects in the architect’s curved urban designs the direct consequences of his voyeuristic sessions; the sensuality of Moorish bodies, by association and projection, informed his proposals to redesign the city. By literally superimposing the megastructures of the Plan Obus onto the bodies of colonized women posed within Orientalist settings, Bool reveals the violence behind the idea of progress in Le Corbusier’s proposals for the city’s modernisation, and does so through a postcolonial, feminist lens.

Initiated by the Musée d’art de Joliette, this exhibition is coproduced in Europe by the Centre culturel canadien, Paris, and the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, and travelling in Canada to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston. We wish to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support.

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