Event contact Alison Honnor

Sharon Kivland will talk about THE NATURAL FORMS Part II. The Readers. The Foxes. The Tracts. Some Coquetteries, her current exhibition at the Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin.

There are women innégligées and in bed-jackets (liseuses), copied faithfully from the pages of French lingerie magazines of the 1950s. These may not be ‘femmes folles de leur corps’ as the red ribbons around their necks and the red covers of their reading matter indicate something more is at stake than indolence and luxury. Foxes, naturalised (as the French say; that is, more natural than Nature, and become good citizens) carry silk negligees in their jaws and paws. 

Folded pages in the pink paper of the Financial Times show women dressed (undressed) in lovely leisure wear, as a corps morcelés lacking a face; the extended captions opposite describe the detail of fabric and ornamentation, in too much lingering detail, one might say (there is something unseemly about it) and the title of each is drawn from Marx’s Capital, the commodity as feminine, a woman to be exchanged and to accrue value in that exchange. 

A series of short films plays endlessly, in each of which a single page in a French lingerie magazine is tracked from neck to knee or foot, slipping over and down the garment, a negligée, accompanied by a voiceover reading a description of the lingerie trends of the season. Reading and politics are evoked and feminised, draped in silk or satin, befurred.