Channa Boon: The Hague Forest by Night

Karen Barad

Trained as a painter, Boon produces films, installations, drawings, performances and objects that can function together as one work or exist as solitary pieces. While Boon engages with the body, space, the landscape, sound and communities in intuitive and cross-sectional ways, her writing and research functions as a reservoir of knowledge and direction within this practice. Her research is based on a trans-disciplinary practice, connecting the different fields of (embodied) knowledge with each other. The source image and material in the work consists of the zooming – in to a story, a history or a phenomenon at the one hand and the connection of this with the physical, the body and the now on the other. This ‘physical’, ‘body’ or ‘now’ is very much akin to the so called ‘thick present’ in the work of philosopher Karen Barad; an ongoing now-ness that is connected on a deep and complex level within the tissue of existence. For Boon this thick present is a tangible and a possible translation of a phenomenon that she calls the ‘Acoustic Body’; a heightened perception and experience of the human body, the landscape, space and the object, and thereby the perception that these are all carriers of energy and exchange and connect with each other on a subtle level. Boon uses the word acoustic because she registers this exchange on a sub-acoustic level; you could also call it vibration. Boon gives shape and highlights this 'sound' or sub-acoustic experience through her work.

Channa Boon

Pagina's

zondag 4 november 2001

The Hague Forest by Night