‘Entreprise de Séduction’: Sharon Kivland’s new exhibition at HEC Paris opens 11 January 2018

Dr Sharon Kivland, Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, presents a new exhibition entitled ENTREPRISE DE SÉDUCTION at the Contemporary Art Space at HEC Paris. The solo show, organised in partnership with Musée de la Toile de Jouy and which opened on 11 January 2018, will be shown until 11 May 2018 and is open by appointment.

Beneath the discourses and ideologies in which the colonial web is spun lies the appetite of the merchant. While colonialism is made up of many pieces, its core is economic, a machine of production and manufacture,profit and reinvestment, appetite and consumption.
Aimé Césaire

Give some ribbons, gauze, muslin, and flowers to a tasteful young girl who despises fashion. […] she is going to produce for herself an outfit that will make her a hundred times more charming.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

ENTREPRISE DE SÉDUCTION  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 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.

 

 

 

 

The exhibition is composed of four tableaux. Each provides a scene or staging. Each incorporates similar elements in different forms: skin, furniture, image/s, naturalised creatures, and an object or objects made by hand, by a skilled producer in four cases, by a diligent amateur in the fifth. In each scene there is a reference drawn from the Manufacture Oberkampf.

 

 

 

 

ENTREPRISE DE SÉDUCTION
Contemporary Art Space,  HEC Paris
1 Rue de la Liberation 78350 Jouy-en-Josas, Paris
11 January 2018 until 11 May 2018, open by appointment

Find out more about Sharon Kivland’s work here.

Dr Sharon Kivland is a Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.