Realized with the technical and engeenering help of Ethan Hayes-Chute
The great eccentric female artist resurrects: and not just once, but throughout the exhibition. Not to laugh at us sweetly and to welcome applause, but to finally claim the money she was unjustly deprived of during her life and « to make a final capitalist joke, from her makeshift grave, as a way of rejoining our disgusting world and as a way of haunting it. » The eccentricity attributed to many female artists functions both as a trap and as a survival mechanism: it makes them (at least) visible, often after their death.
For Pauline Curnier Jardin the slap puppet is, this time, the personification of Carol Rama at the age of 85 when she received her first price but it could also be Leonora Carrington or Claude Cahun, or Elsa, or… Curnier Jardin's work is also a return to the astonishing and bewildering (female) body: what it can do to itself, what other people desire to do with it and what it can do back. The rising body is fragmented, or it is not complete or resolved, it’s soft and hard, dead and alive. In a recent interview with Rama - guided by a medium (!), the artist said that she does not want anyone to celebrate her imperfection, that she has done enough herself already. This work is not a celebration of imperfection, but of anger, pride, bedevilment: “Give the dead great women artists the money they should have had from the art market when they were still alive! (or simply strong enough to slap butts, beat faces, when they were young but ugly, too complicate, depressive, too eccentric, lesbian, scared or scary, powerful, messy, hysterical, mega lazy, mean, erotomaniac, mothers, etc etc etc x 15)”