by Sharon Kivland

On Figure/s. Drawing After Bellmer
Kate Macfarlane, Michael Newman, Sharon Kivland, & Louis Mason (eds)
Ma Bibliotheque - 17.00€ -  out of stock

Raised by a fascist father in Nazi Germany, the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) dedicated his œuvre to a perverse rewriting of the symbolic order. Famous for the two dolls he constructed in the mid-1930s, his transgressive ideas around the body as anagram were shared by his partner Unica Zürn. Both broke received codes of behaviour and the implicit rules of language, providing fertile ground for artists and other thinkers, including feminists, to similarly rewrite the body. ON FIGURE/S is published in parallel with the exhibition FIGURE/S: drawing after Bellmer (Drawing Room, London, September 2021). It gathers responses to its themes: body as letter, word and sentence; perversion and enjoyment; technical and forensic drawing in pursuit of pleasure; the other than human—becoming object, plant, animal. This book is a way to think through and with works of art and their histories, involving multiple textual forms, collage, and drawing, which take the radical and transgressive energy of Bellmer and Zürn in unexpected directions.

Contributors: Paul Buck,  Lola Bunting , Alice Butler, Paul Chan, Iris Colomb, Vincent Dachy, Zoë Dowlen, Rachel Genn, Aurelia Guo,  Mathew Hale, Tom Hastings, Rebecca Jagoe, Sharon Kivland, Sarah Lederman, Kate Macfarlane, Kumi Machida, Louis Mason, Reba Maybury, Jade Montserrat, John Murphy, Michael Newman, Bernard Noël, Tamarin Norwood , Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Aura Satz, Sophie Seita, Anne Lesley Selcer,  Isabel Seligman, Sarah Wilson 

On Care
Rebecca Jagoe & Sharon Kivland, (eds)
Ma Bibliotheque - 21.00€ -  out of stock

Care is a matter of responsibility for human and nonhuman allies, an ecological network. Care is an imperative, and acting with care approaches the world beyond selfhood. ON CARE, an aggregate of voices, discusses the politics of caring, support, and the role of welfare in an increasingly neoliberal society. It questions who is seen as worthy of care, whose narratives are given attention, and whose lives are overlooked in a complex web of assemblages: conceptions of medical authority, the co-option of self-care in political rhetoric, care as a commodity in the hospitality industry, intergenerational intimacy, sexecology; care as utopian and care as transactional. ON CARE maps a constellation of perspectives, as testaments, fictions, and essays, addressing the relation between good health, interdependence, and the ethics of (self)care. 

Contributors: Tom Allen, Uma Breakdown, Alice Butler, Oisín Byrne, Julia Calver, Jamie Crewe, Juliette Desorgues, Rachel Genn, Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Laura González, Holly Graham, Helen Hester, Justin Hogg, Juliet Jacques, Mati Jhurry & Rebecca Jagoe,  Juliet Johnson, Sophie Jung, Daisy Lafarge, Elisabeth Lebovici, Rebecca Lennon, Rona Lorimer, Katharina Ludwig, Mira Mattar, Martina Mullaney, Cinzia Mutigli, Carolina Ongaro, Molly Palmer, Roy Claire Potter, Nat Raha, Helena Reckitt, Ruiz Stephinson, Erica Scourti, Victoria Sin, Himali Singh Soin & Tyler Rai, Miguel Soto Karlovic,  Isabella Streffen, Jamie Sutcliffe, Maija Timonen, Lynn Turner, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Daniella Valz Gen, Nina Wakeford, Alberta Whittle 

Care(less). A Supplement To On Care
Gemma Blackshaw & Sharon Kivland (eds)
Ma Bibliotheque - 13.00€ -  out of stock

The harshest of lights shines on the question of care in the age of neo-liberalism and globalisation: who gets it, who needs it, who does it, who controls it. The Care research group at the Royal College of Art works in this light to ask how to care for human bodies in the inequitable societies COVID-19 has re-inscribed, through the activation of creative research practices as means of caring. Reflecting on the care phenomenon of 2020/21, the group invited the editors of ON CARE (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2020) to return to their book conceived before the pandemic. As part of that discussion, the group was asked to consider what is lack of care and what lacks in care. Their responses form this supplement to ON CARE, working with what was at hand, with what was missed, forgotten, neglected, ignored: CARE(LESS).

Contributors: Sohaila Baluch, Gemma Blackshaw, Anja Borowicz, Caroline Douglas, Shannon Forrester, Marita Fraser, Nora Heidorn, Ameera Kawash, Sofie Layton, Joshua Leon, Xiaoyi Nie, Amy Peace Buzzard, Ilona Sagar, Dafne Salis, Adam Walker, Sharon Young, Shuye Zhang

ABÉCÉDAIRE
Sharon Kivland
Moist Books - 16.00€ -

“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.”

Unable To Achieve Broad Recognition In My Lifetime, I Laboured In Obscurity Until My Death Last Year
Sharon Kivland
Ma Bibliotheque - 13.00€ -

For nearly two years the author collected phrases from the exhibition press releases she received through email, posting certain of them on Facebook in a rather unsystematic way (that is to say, when she felt like it), with only one change, that of the personal pronoun, so each statement appeared vainglorious, absurd, even tragic. She supposes the measure was if they made her laugh or gasp or used words she deplores when thinking or writing about art. The posts gathered quite a following. Some people still mention them to her, and others have asked her to look at their own press releases before circulation.

These extracts have provoked laughter, disbelief (especially when performed as public readings, when she has  been obliged to swear to their veracity), self-recognition, and yes, shame.

She had only three rules: 1) She would not quote the press release of anyone she knows (certainly she could have done—she must admit that both a friend and someone she dislikes intensely have slipped in, and she fervently hopes neither ever reads this book); 2) She would not alter anything except the pronoun (this is largely true; however, for this book, she corrected some errors of punctuation and spelling, changed spellings to their English form, and employed her beloved Oxford comma); and 3) She would not use anything the artist had written (this, too, is true, save for one exception that was too wonderful not to include).

Finally, she  gathered a collection of endorsements, some along the way, others when she indicated this work was done. She is still alive and she continues to labour in obscurity. 

The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin
ed. Helen Clarke & Sharon Kivland
Ma Bibliotheque - 12.50€ -  out of stock

In A Berlin Chronicle Walter Benjamin describes his autobiography as a space to be walked (indeed, it is a labyrinth, with entrances he calls primal acquaintances). The contributors to The Lost Diagrams respond to the invitation to accompany Benjamin in reproducing the web of connections of his diagram, which, once lost (he was inconsolable), was never fully redrawn. They translate his words into maps, trees, lists, and constellations. Their diagrams, after Benjamin, are fragments, scribbles, indexes, bed covers, and body parts. Subjectivities sharpen and blur, merge and redefine, scatter and recollect. Benjamin writes: ‘Whatever cross connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the inter-twinements of our path through life’.

Contributors: Helen Clarke, Sam Dolbear, Sharon Kivland, Christian A. Wollin

Moi
Sharon Kivland
Ma Bibliotheque - 6.00€ -

The straplines of a number of advertisements drawn from magazines of the 1950s are turned into drawings, as though a particularly vain and narcissistic woman speaks (as of course she does), She is ‘en pleine forme’ of her beauty. (2016).

On Violence
Sharon Kivland and Rebecca Jagoe (ed)
Ma Bibliotheque - 15.00€ -  out of stock

Violence is in language and violence is language. The violence of language stratifies voices into those that matter and those that do not, using ideas of appropriate form and structure as its weaponry. It claims propriety and politeness are the correct mode of address, when urgency and anger are what is needed. Where languages intersect, hierarchies of language become means for domination and colonization, for othering, suppression, negation, and obliteration. The demand for a correctness of grammar, the refusal to see what is seen as incorrect, the dismissal of vernacular in favour of the homogenised tongue: all are violent. The narrative of history is a narrative of violence. The contributions herein refuse this narrative. They explore how violence permeates and performs in language, how language may be seized, taken back to be used against the overwhelming force of structural and institutional violence that passes as acceptable or normal. Violence may be a force for rupture, for refusal, for dissent, for the herstories that refuse to cohere into a dominant narrative.

Contributors: Travis Alabanza, Katherine Angel, Skye Arundhati-Thomas, Mieke Bal, Janani Balasubramanian, Elena Bajo, Jordan Baseman, Emma Bolland, Pavel Büchler, Paul Buck,Kirsten Cooke, Jih-Fie Cheng, John Cunningham, Andy Fisher, Caspar Heinemann, Jakob Kolding, Candice Lin, Rudy Loewe, Nick Mwaluko, Vanessa Place, Katharina Poos, Tai Shani, Linda Stupart, Benjamin Swaim, Jonathan Trayner, Jala Wahid, Isobel Wohl, Sarah Wood

A Lover's Discourse
Sharon Kivland
Ma Bibliotheque - 10.00€ -  out of stock
I read unsolicited ‘encounter’ emails as if they were intended for me alone in a sincere desire for a real love relation, until their repetition bored me.I posted them on Facebook, while I sought their form. My friend A. C. wrote to tell me how much he was enjoying my lover’s discourse. The form became clear: after the French edition of Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (“Tel Quel”, Seuil, 1977).
Reading Nana
Sharon Kivland
Ma Bibliotheque - 10.00€ -  out of stock
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.
cart (0)