There is no heroism; there is only duty and revolutionary passion, of which one should no more make a virtue than one should make one of love.
Louise Michel

We never talked about men or clothes.It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.
Nina Simone

I am an artist and writer living in London and France. Until 2022 I was Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. I am Visiting Professor at Kingston University, London. I am also a Research Associate of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London. I have exhibited widely in Europe and North America. Publications include A Case of Hysteria, Book Works, London, 1999, a bloody big red book, which I feel deserves more attention. Filigranes Éditions, France, published a small book on my work Le bonheur des femmes, a work that 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, and this is still a work that haunts me. My practice is one of stupid refinement, trapped in archives, libraries, the arcades, and the intersection of public political action and private subjectivity.

I am following Sigmund Freud on holiday, and 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 have forgotten 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).Forbes Morlock and I worked on Freud and the Gift of Flowers in 2009 (information as material, once again). The small book Afterwards, although published by Warwick Arts Centre (2009) may be considered to be part of the same series. I h started a new series of modest booklets in which I recount railway-related scenes and incidents in the works of Freud, under the title Reisen, but have only produced two to date. A third holiday book,entitled The Forgetting of a Proper Name, in which neither Freud nor I quite manage to get away from it all, was published by CUBEARTEDITIONS and information as material in 2012. Volume IV, part I, A Cavernous Defile, was published by CUBEARTEDITIONS in 2013, and therein are a number of walks, an excursion in the mountains, mushrooms, and two Lucias, alive and dead. This book was translated into Italian by Silvia Bre in 2016, and published as Freud in vacanza by the Museo storico del Trentino. These books are the subject of a diverting essay by Elizabeth Legge in The Art Journal, June 2015, entitled 'Not getting there is half the fun: Holidays with Freud'. 

I was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, where I was happily translating the Freudian canon, with particular attention to typefaces and the three essays on sexuality, from 2007 to 2011. In early 2008 I exhibited at Sleeper, Edinburgh, for which I worked hard on my embroidery and my worst traits,and at Feriancova Contemporary/ Bastart, Bratislava, where I took Rousseau to task on natural education.In November of the same year I exhibited a new series of works at CHELSEA Space, which insisted on a relation between fashion and revolutionary moments in the history of France.There are more works in this series, some of which were shown in Pont-Aven in October/November 2009, including a stuffed vixen holding the PUF edition of Marx's Capital in her jaws. I had solo shows at Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf (2009), AMT_Project, Bratislava (2010), DomoBaal, London (2011, 2013), and the Ideas Store, London (2011–12), in which I exhibited works that drew on my collections. FRAC Bretagne acquired several works for its collection, as did Penguin Books, God bless them. I curated an exhibition for the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, entitled 'Afterwards' in 2009 – a book of the same name accompanies it.

I was working on some rather amateur water colours, copying old postcards from memory, which gave me great pleasure, despite their talentless inadequacy, but these have come to an end. I re-photographed the smoke of steam trains, the flat, limpid waters of mountain lakes, and the snow on Alpine peaks (some of these were shown at Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer in 2009, some at DOMOBAAL and at at AMT_Project in 2011). Somewhat to my surprise, these turned into three very short films, which were screened in New York and St Petersburg in autumn 2011. Painstakingly I sketched women modelling lingerie (and copied quite beautifully their textual descriptions), while thinking of nothing. I was painting women's faces, but have had enough of this (some were shown at AMT_Project and some in my exhibition at DOMOBAAL in 2011), so am back to lingerie, silk, and perversion (same old, same old). With a sanguine Conté pencil on papier de soie I drew the passionate descriptions of silk given to Dr Clérambault by his kleptomaniac patients, each pencil breaking after a few words. New versions of these were made in 2023 for an exhibition around Jacques Lacan, intended for the section on his life, but any inclusion of contemporary works or art was refused by the estate of Lacan, fearing pollution (we bring the plague).     

I paid my son an enormous amount of money to fill old school exercises books with handwritten lines (as though it were a cruel punishment), which are the indexical references to mother/son relations in Freud's works, and these were exhibited at the Freud Museum in 'Les paris sont ouverts' in the summer of 2011. The work is entitled Mon Fils, after the son who feels he has been exploited.

In 2011 I noted the weather of Freud's holidays, the meals (good and bad) he ate while on holiday, and the train times of his journeys – the two former are now appendices in the series Freud on Holiday and the last is the second book in the Reisen series.In 2013 I added two new appendices to the series Freud on Holiday – Freud's Hotels and Freud's Shopping (also exquisitely designed by James Brook), and in 2017, Freud's Views.

In 2012 and part of 2013 I eliminated horizons on old postcards of various sea views, having also spoilt many postcards of Rome in my attempt to turn them into negatives in the work The unconscious is a city. Sometimes I draw bridles, bits, stirrups, saddles, and dressage movements, while thinking of 'Little Hans'. I continue to rewrite Zola's novel Nana, from a number of positions, most recently as descriptions as though by Nana (I call this work Nana. Ghostwriter; in French, it is Nana. Négre), according to furniture and soft furnishings, according to odour, and as a small booklet observing/describing, from memory, Nana's dance, danced by Anna Karina, in the film Vivre sa vie, by Jean-Luc Godard. Some of these may be read in Crux Desperationes, edited by Riccardo Boglione, a journal of conceptual writing also to be found on Ubuweb. They are now collected in a single volume entitled Reading Nana(MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE 2017).

In 2012 I had a solo exhibition at Galerie des petits carreaux, Paris, for which I assembled a rather odious display of feminity(for some people, at least, though others may feel quite differently, as did Bernard Géniès, writing in the Nouvel Observateur, in a review in which he was kind enough to assign me two stars). In 2013 I embellished a large number of rather grubby vintage collars of crochet, lace, cotton, with etiquettes declaring that 'je suis une petite charmeuse' (and I am, sometimes), and associated these with some adorable stuffed squirrels. These were on exhibition in 'Ulysses, l'autre mer' at the Musée de la Compagnie des Indes in Lorient, acting as sirens as much as colonial pillagers. In January 2013 I had a small solo exhibition at DOMOBAAL, London, entitled Reproductions II, which echoed a previous show there. It was accompanied by two lovely essays by Steve Pile and Jan Campbell, available as a small publication, and on the closing day, Sarah Sparkes hosted a séance, with the presence of Birgitta Hosea, Peter Suchin, and Forbes Morlock (who kindly stepped in to channel Sarah Wood at the last minute). The gallery launched a new subscription series, with the gift of the small yet elegant booklet Femme du monde/Women of the World for early subscribers.In November 2013 I had a solo show at Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, entitled Folles de leur corps, after a footnote in Marx's Capital, which became rather more than a footnote in 2014 at CGP, London, as Folles de leur corps / Crazy about their bodies .This body of work developed into The Natural Forms (Natürliche Formen), as three exhibitions to date in Cottbus, Berlin, and Leipzig, in various formations, tableaux vivants or morts, in 2015 to 2016. In 2018 I made an exhibition for l'Espace d'art Contemporain HEC in Jouy-en-Josas in January 2018, entitled Entreprise de séduction, which was seen by almost no-one. In 2017 I curated an exhibition in collaboration with FRAC Bretagne, Armel Beaufils: Le Regard des femmes , with forty artists, introduced by my solo exhibition Le Modèle in the context of Festivart, St-Briac a month or two earlier, curated by FRAC de Bretagne. My book A Lover's Discourse/Un discours amoureux was selected for the Bob Calle Prix du livre d’artiste, which was cheering, even though (astonishingly) I did not win it. I had two exhibitions in Switzerland before COVID struck, again following the education of women, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile Zola and his Nana, and Karl Marx's dazzling commodity.

There is a great deal of new work since all of that,including Les Femmes-Bêtes, of course, but I am too slack to put it on this website – one day, perhaps. I am currently working on the natural form (toujours, toujours , fables, and the furies. Some of the fable works may be seen here. I have completed The Bloody Radicals, a series of a hundred and twenty drawings that follow the French revolutionary calendar according to roots that bleed, now stacked neatly in a large folder, waiting for a spark of interest and fervour. I am turning around a new book that takes up the pneumatic post services, but it is slow going. I continue my editing of the love letters Jacques Lacan sent me during our long and troubled love affair, which will be published by Tenement Press in 2025. His postcards to me, sent from Munich in 1958, were on display at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, as exhibition on my beloved's influence on art. My memoir, Almanch. A Year in the French Revolutionary Calendar, is forthcoming from Grand Iota in 2025. In autumn 2024 JOAN publishes my novel Her Discourse, an account of an amorous relationship.

Current:

'Women and Freud: patients, pioneers, artists', Freud Museum, London, 30 October 2024 – 5 May 2025
' Animali: Luigi Zuccheri & Company", at Edizione Perifera, Luzern


Recent (2022 to present):

ENVOIS VI, PROMISES MADE BY JACQUES LACAN TO SHARON KIVLAND, BETWEEN 1953 AND 1964, Intergraphia, 2024
‘A Case History’ in STRINGS Issue I, a new literary journal.
‘For Katharina’, in MINOR LITERATURES
‘Her Discourse’ in COUNTERTEXT
The Incorruptible, an opuscule from Piece of Paper Press, republished in the Salt anthology edited by Nicholas Royle, Best British Short Stories 2023
A chapter from ALMANACH in Prototype 05. 
This Nivôse. The diary of a month in the French Revolutionary Calendar in the LA RB Quarterly issue 37: Fire 
#THEORYPLUSHOUSEWORK a project by Joanna Walsh or PHI Foundation, Montréal
The Bacchae, a wild reading list, for Scrambled ontologies. A fabulation at Sies +Höke|An extract from a work-in-progress,
 ALMANACH Pamenar Press
ENVOIS V in MAP

Forthcoming:

The Bloody Radicals, ZAK, Zitadelle Spandau, Berlin, September 2025
ALMANACH. A YEAR IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY CALENDAR,  Grand Iota, March 2025
ENVOIS. The Complete Correspondence. Love letters from  Jacques  Lacan to Sharon Kivland, 1973 to 1981, Tenement Press, June 2025
HER DISCOURSE,  Joan Publishing, June 2025

I publish under MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, a small press based in London, and books may be seen on the publications page here, as well as here: https://mabibliotheque.cargo.site/MA-BIBLIOTHEQUE

Do see also the website of Documents d'Artistes Bretagne, which has a very nice dossier on my work in English and French.

There is an interview in NOUVELLES de l'ESTAMPE, Revue du Comitié national de la gravure française, Centre National du Livre, Paris, 2015: Sharon Kivland, ‘Le temps logiques’, by Véronique Gorzccynsk

ABÉCÉDAIRE, a novel,
MOIST books, 2022
'I wrote (more or less, for promises are always hard to keep, even those made to oneself ) for five days a week for a year. I wrote no more than a page, or rather, I wrote only for the length of the analytic hour, fifty minutes (though I also practiced the variable session at times)… I followed Freud’s model of train travel for his theory of free association, acting ‘as though, for instance, [you were] a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which [you] see outside’. As for my characters, many of their names begin with A. Some of these women exist or existed, others are from fiction, or write fiction. Some are friends or acquaintances. None are credited but a keen reader could recognise many of them. I invented nothing. I am the aleph.

A Book and its Supplement:

READING NANA. An experimental novel
ISBN 978-1-910055-30-4
MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE,
140 mm x 205 mm, 104 pages, perfect-bound
Emile Zola's novel Nana is re-read and re-written,ghost-written, condensed according to soft furnishings, lighting effects (including metaphor), other women, death and dying, cats, anti-semitism, money, smell, and many other categories.

Emptiness & Silence. A Supplement to Reading Nana, 2017
ISBN 978-1-910055-32-8 12 pages
140 mm x 205 mm
Format: softback, sewn
The instances and insistences of emptiness, silence, nothingness, absence, mutism, loss, deafness ...

Some projects that are dear to me:

ENTREPRISE DE SÉDUCTION

Espace d'art contemporain HEC, Jouy-en-Josas
Vernissage 11 January 2018 to 27 April 2018
This is an exhibition in five parts, each corresponding to a room in the exhibition space. The work developed from research on the Manufacture Oberkampf in the archives of the Musée de la Toile de Jouy, and the exhibition will be followed by a publication in 2018. The period of activity of the Manufacture Oberkampf spans early industrial development in pre-revolutionary France to its closure in 1843; the end of the empire marks the decline of the enterprise. The Manufacture may be noted for the ‘benevolent’ factory conditions, the pastoral and political images of the printed cloth it produced, and its somewhat concealed relation to the colonial enterprise. Oberkampf’s factory displayed the conditions of production of the transition to what E. P. Thompson calls ‘industrial capitalism’, not only in the changes in techniques of manufacture that demand greater synchronisation of labour and increasing exactitude in time-routines, but also in how these changes are lived through. A ‘factory system’ and a ‘domestic system’ overlap.

The works address the complex relations between desire and consumption under capitalism, reconceptualising as the capture and remoulding of desire. Two figures set the boundaries: Rousseau and Robespierre, both present as corpses in some form: the tomb of the former, as an etching derived from a toile de Jouy, and the latter as the cadaver of a headless mannequin. The works are conceived as objects with the form of visual literacy. They have material agency. They are seen. They are read. The exhibition includes antiques, trifles, ribbons, silk and lace, déshabillés. It is incroyable and merveilleux.

L’exposition est composée de cinq parties qui, chacune, correspondent à une salle de l’espace de la galerie. Le travail a été mené à partir d’une recherche sur la Manufacture Oberkampf dans les archives du Musée de la Toile de Jouy. Il donnera lieu en 2018 à une publication. La Manufacture Oberkampf a été active du début du développement industriel dans la France prérévolutionnaire à sa fermeture en 1843 ; la fin de l’Empire marque le déclin de l’entreprise. Les « bonnes » conditions de travail, les images pastorales et politiques du tissu imprimé qu’elle produit et les liens quelque peu voilés avec l’entreprise coloniale constituent autant d’éléments notables de la Manufacture. L’usine d’Oberkampf exposait les conditions de production communes à la période de transition vers ce que E. P. Thompson nomme le « capitalisme industriel » : non seulement les transformations des techniques de manufacture qui exigent une plus grande synchronisation du labeur et une précision accrue de l’organisation du temps, mais aussi la manière dont ces changements sont vécus. Un « système de l’usine » et un « système domestique » se chevauchent.

Les œuvres traitent des rapports complexes entre désir et consommation en temps de capitalisme, re-conceptualisées comme la capture et la reconfiguration du désir. Deux figures tutélaires, Rousseau et Robespierre, fixent les limites de l’exposition, tous les deux d’une certaine manière incarnés, le premier par sa tombe figurant sur une gravure d’après une toile de Jouy; et par le cadavre d’un mannequin sans tête pour le second. Les œuvres sont conçues comme des objets détenteurs d’une littérarité visuelle. Elles possèdent une force matérielle. Elles sont vues. Elles sont lues. Antiquités, bagatelles, rubans, soie et dentelle, déshabillés…, l’exposition est « incroyable » et « merveilleuse ».

A radio broadcast by psychoanalyst and poet Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson about Freud on Holiday: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/775630?programid=503

THE NATURAL FORMS. PART III. THE TRACTS. READERS AND LISEUSES. MADEMOISELLE LA MARCHANDISE. & OTHER WORKS
27.04.16 to 2.05.16, HGB, Leipzig Academy of Arts , Germany

The Natural Forms. Part II. The Readers. The Foxes. The Tracts. Some Coquetteries
11.12.2015 to 30.01.2016
Galerie Nord / Kunstverein Tiergarten, Turmstrasse 75, 10551 Berlin
With an opening event: itinerant interlude #1867, Anna Clementi




Natürliche Formen – Von Frauen,Füchsen und Lesern
Ausstellung: 03.10.– 15.11.2015
Das dkw. Kunstmuseum Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus wird als Teil
der Brandenburgischen Kulturstiftung Cottbus durch das
Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur des Landes
Brandenburg und die Stadt Cottbus gefördert.
dkw. Kunstmuseum Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus
Uferstraße / Am Amtsteich 15
03046 Cottbus
Telefon: 0355/494940-40
www.museum-dkw.de / info@museum-dkw.de
Öffnungszeiten: Di—So 10—18 Uhr