Sharon Kivland’s work is canny, a play with a force of imagination as it holds us hostage between our secret desires and the banal. Through her work she creates a space of highly formulised attention, an event within which the viewer is drawn like a detective, both intellectually and through desire into pleasure of the gaze.
The title of the new photographic installations by Sharon Kivland is taken from Mozart’s opera, Cosi fan Tutte. The work is based around the structure of the opera; it’s arrangement echoes its staging and characterisation. The opera is a work of masquerades and doublings, of couplings which are uncoupled under direction of a libertine, Don Alfonso, sets out to prove to his young friends, Gugliemo and Ferando, that all women are unfaithful and, more than that, anyone can come to fill the place of the Other if the conditions are right; in effect, that desire is essentially the desire of the Other’s desire.