Sharon Kivland
SHARON KIVLAND is an artist and writer, and also an editor and publisher under the imprint MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. Her previous books include Abécédaire (2022) and A Lover’s Discourse/Un discours amoreux (2017), which was shortlisted for the Bob Calle Prix de livre d’artiste. A series of 120 drawings that accompany Almanach entitled ‘The Bloody Radicals’, will be exhibited at ZAK, Zittadelle Spandau, Berlin, in September 2025. She lives in London and rural France.
ALMANACH
A Year in the French Revolutionary Calendar
Sharon Kivland
“The year of Almanach is structured by the French Republican calendar and interrupted by other systems of time-managing mnemonics that have sought to perfect people in their own image.The resulting jump-cuts from images of plants and agricultural implements to the gory fates of saints and tips for making the best use of one’s time prove fertile ground for the growth of meditations, speculations, and memories that are thought-provoking, often funny and seem
determined not to let anyone, author included, off the hook. Kivland also considers how non-humans experience time and, through her relation of the tasks involved in gardening and food production, foregrounds how carrying these out ‘at the right time’ is becoming harder due to climate change....” – BRIDGET PENNEY
“[This book] is a durational delight. Moving across its pages I feel the days passing, the seasons, time moving and also blurring, plus a strange desire to pluck out certain sentences and embroider them onto silk screens. I suppose this is because while Almanach is a book about time it is also absolutely a book about a place: this field, this house, this wine, these figs.Truly it is a delicious, tactile, heady thing.” – DANIELLE DUTTON
"To be carried about and read as a companion throughout the year, Almanach is a visionary grafting of the furtive, fertile, metamorphosis of things both personal and nonhuman onto the political; global conflicts, violence against women. As she documents a continuous activity of living inside a revolutionary time where saints, rose de Berne tomatoes coiled around spiralled tuteurs, Rosa Luxemburg, archives, wounds, hens, abundance of all kinds, mortality, and ‘women’s work’ constellate a coexistence of temporal intersections without bourgeois taming, Sharon Kivland allows us to hold the conjunction of opposites in resistance, always in service to the work that extends outside books. I felt great joy on encountering this candid, uncompromising work; how we might move through this world, where being is a state of interanimation – to animate mutually." – LUCY MERCER
"Sharon Kivland’s wonderful Almanach is a joyous reanimation of the French Republican Calendar, rich in the sensory knowledge that comes from passionate attention to materials and materiality. It weaves the names and seasons of the historical text into a daily texture of incident and interaction, making them the filter for a perspective on contemporary global events, which are keenly observed through a history of unfinished revolutionary potential. A non-native terroir, where roots are for supporting others rather than fixing to a spot, is the terrain of a generous sociality extending beyond the human and into the vibrant temporalities of plants and animals. This radical porosity between times, places, and species sustains political hope at a moment when it is much needed."
– ZOË SKOULDING
(Cover illustrations by the author)
978-1-874400-93-5 314pp 2025