SHARON KIVLAND
There are three bookworks in the artist Sharon Kivland' s new series, Freud on Holiday . They all concern her particular relation to the work of Sigmund Freud. Through photographs and essays, Kivland's books re-imagine journeys made (and sometimes dreamt) by Freud to European sites of archaeological importance.
In the first book in the series, Freud Dreams of Rome, Kivland explores the longing for Rome which Freud felt as he worked on his seminal project The Interpretation of Dreams . Freud dreamt of visiting Rome four times before actually getting there – when his experience of Rome shifted from the imaginary to the real. Kivland's book creates an uncanny atmosphere, as do the images, allowing the reader to take a dérive through Freud's imagination. The images - introduced as ‘Freud's holiday photographs of Rome' - are rather strange. They show no people. They are oddly cropped. They reveal only impasses, dark courtyards, angles of buildings. They appear as plates, tipped-in after the printing of the book. Their source is uncertain. The text appears to be a conference paper, with sudden asides and peculiar distractions
A Disturbance of Memory
Sharon Kivland , A Disturbance of Memory, from the series Freud on Holiday, Volume II. Introduction by Craig Saper, Greek translation by Maria Skamaga, ISBN 978-0-9553092-3-6 (UK) 186 pages, softback, sewn, with screen printed dust jacket, 230mm x 150mm, 35 black and white photographs, 15 black and white illustrations, £19.99
Like Sigmund Freud and his brother Alexander, Sharon Kivland and her sister go on holiday together each year. In Trieste in 1904 SF and his brother determine to go to Corfu but are told by their host it will be too hot and they should go to Athens instead. Any change of plan seems impractical, but they succeed in booking tickets for Athens. When Freud arrives in Athens and stands on the Acropolis he is surprised to find himself thinking: 'So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!' His surprise is twofold; firstly, that something unbelievable exists, and secondly, that its existence should have been in doubt. In A Disturbance of Memory, SK and her sister, accompanied also by SK's son, follow the Freud brothers to Trieste and Athens, but are frequently diverted by other traces, including those of James Joyce, Jacques Derrida, Ulysses, and Italo Svevo. There are photographs and drawings of uncertain origin, and descriptions of food, trains, and family romances. The English text is followed by a Greek translation.
L'esprit d'escalier
(the wit or mind or spirit or phantom on or of the
stairs) is a revised version of a paper given in 'Outside/In:
architecture, psychoanalysis, and spaces in-between' at the Freud
Museum,London, in June 2006, during 'Architecture Week' (Arts Council
of England), the text ostensibly pursues the references to domestic
architecture in the dreams of Sigmund Freud as a narrative, while the
subtext expresses anxiety, loss, and the revisiting of a subjective
past - oh, and the forgetting of a lovely pair of shoes, as the
author and Freud miss a collision on the stairs of 19 Bergasse,
Vienna.
The text is punctuated by a series of black and white photographs, taken on the stairs of the same apartment block, as the author searched for her title, her shoes, and her subject.
