M HKA Ensembles

Artist Novel, 20.5 x 14 cm, 104 p, language: English, French, publisher: MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, ISBN:978-1-910055-28-1.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2029/823).

Literary synopsis

Sharon Kivland has been reading Nana by Émile Zola over a number of years. Zola’s novel, his ‘true story of the demi-monde’, was published in instalments, first appearing in October 1879 in Le Voltaire. The definitive version in book form was published on 15 February by Charpentier. Kivland read and reread the book, in both French and English. She digested the book, condensing it, organising it into themes, appearances; assimilating it. She read (one might say perform) her assimilations, and danced one, according to Jean-Luc Godard’s film version, inviting others to join her. Some parts of her reading have been published in instalments. Herein they are assembled, a whole novel that is largely incomplete, as Nana or Nana slips from the grasp. Her value lies in that she can be exchanged. Her value lies in that another has had her. Her body has useful qualities, and these qualities are also of value. Nana or Nana is of value because she has been used; her potential for use is realised and finely calibrated. The cleavage between her use and exchange is less clearly demarcated. She eludes possession, no matter how many times she is had, no matter how many times it is read. There is no portrait of her, though Manet paints one which or who is like her. A horse is named for her, described in more detail than she. I take it upon myself to depict her, to speak for her and as her: a woman who is a book, a book that is a woman.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Reading Nana figures in a number of Kivland's works (see images attached):

Ma Nana (huit fois): The audience’s assessment of Nana has been rewritten, in the first-person singular, taking back the attributes (the artist likes to think), and is printed on fair-calf leather, like a carte de visite. Fair-calf is smooth and the surface is absorbent. It is sometimes called book calf. It is the closest to human skin. The descriptions of the transgressive body of that natural woman of the demi-monde, Nana, are returned to her through a simple change in pronoun – yet one also takes them for oneself, in an internalised reading.

La dormeuse: At the end of the eponymous novel by Emile Zola, the lovely Nana is lovely no longer: ‘around this grotesque and horrible mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed in a stream of gold’.

Ma Nana (limited edition book): The texts are extracted from Zola’s novel, once again, with the addition of a comment made by Gustave Flaubert. The book is excessive in its values of production, and the colophon page appears as part of the book, rather than as a publisher’s addition.

Nana, DIgested According to LIghts & LIghting Effects, Including Metaphor: screenprint on Arches mouldmade paper.

Novel's website