Pauline Curnier Jardin
1980, France
Pauline Curnier Jardin works across installation, performance, film, and drawing. The artist is known for creating fictional cinematic narratives while using the language of documentary film-making. Often accompanied by large installations that are both sculptural and architectural, Curnier Jardin unfolds and amplifies the normal and conceptual thresholds between the two mediums.
Curnier Jardin draws from a vast repertoire of references, ranging from Greco-Roman mythology to folk tales, from various religious practices to pagan rituals. The films and the installations, which she conceives as theatrical stages, reflect spaces of play or popular entertainment, such as circuses, cabarets, carnivals or fun fairs, worlds where all identities, every kind of cross-dressing and reversal, is allowed. In a kind of wild and organic ethnology, Pauline Curnier Jardin documents various rituals: processions, pilgrimages, votive festivals...
Her vocabulary stems just as much from extravaganzas as from horror films or Z movies, while being populated by strange characters both grotesque and uncategorisable, or marginal figures roaming the fringes of cities as well as those of social and gender norms.
Pauline Curnier (Marseille, 1980) lives and works between Rome and Berlin. She is the winner of the 2019 German Preis der Nationalgalerie, the 2021 Villa Romana Prize in Firenze, and recipient of the 2019-2020 Villa Medici fellowship in Rome. Her work was included or commissioned over the last years in: Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz; LIAF 2023; Manifesta 13, Marseille; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Bergen Assembly, Bergen Biennial; International Film Festival, Rotterdam; the 57th Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London; Performa 15, New York. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Centraal Museum, Utrecht, in late 2023.