Sharon
Kivland

I am an artist and writer working in London and France.
Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, I am also a Research Associate of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London. I have exhibited widely in and North America. Publications include A Case of Hysteria, Book Works, London, 1999, a work that led to many other books. Filigrane Editions, France, published a small book on my work Le bonheur des femmes, which began in the perfume departments of the grands magasins of Paris, where I retreated after walking the streets in pursuit of Marx and Freud, in the shadow of Lacan. It is a practice of stupid refinement, trapped in archives, libraries, the arcades, and the intersection of public political action and private subjectivity. I follow Sigmund Freud on holiday, and to date I have dreamt of Rome, been melancholy in Trieste, and had a disturbance of memory in Athens, which can be traced in Freud on Holiday. Volume I. Freud Dreams of Rome (Information as material 2006) and Freud on Holiday. Volume II. A Disturbance of Memory (Information as material, York, with CubeArtEditions, Athens, 2007). I forgot my shoes on the steps of the Freud Museum, London, and I thought of witty and amusing remarks too late on the stairs of the Freud Museum, Vienna, and these events are recounted in L’esprit d’escalier and An Agent of the Estate (Information as material, 2007 and 2008). Recent works have followed the revolutionary movements in France (those moments of communal luxury), taking up fashion and fashioning (the shaping of bodies) and education, and include on-going rewritings of Marx’s footnotes to Capital and Emile Zola’s novel Nana. In any case, reading and politics are evoked and feminised, draped in silk or satin, befurred, charmed and charming. Exhibitions include: Crazy about their bodies / Folles de leur corps (CGP, London, 2104); Natürliche Formen – Von Frauen, Füchsen und Lesern (Dieselkraftwerkmuseum, Cottbus, 2015); and The Natural Forms, Part II: The Readers. The Foxes. The Tracts. Some Coquetteries (Kunstverein-Tiergarten Berlin, 2015-16).