The Associations of Pauline Curnier Jardin

Resistance and imagination in the work of Pauline Curnier Jardin

Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille) creates bold, immersive worlds through film, installation, drawing and performance.

Bodies, images, and narratives converge in a practice driven by a constant pursuit of freedom, transformation, and complexity. Curnier Jardin’s films, drawings, paintings, assemblages, and scenographic installations offer a cathartic plunge into the depths of European cultural history. Each work bears witness to the artist’s interest in stories and in the ways they are constructed through a tangle of politics emanating from the state, the Church, or patriarchy, but also, and above all, through alternative narrative systems that emerge from the less visible zones of our society.

The presentation of her body of work sheds light on the major commitments of the practice: the examination of European cultural history’s foundations through vernacular expressions and genres such as carnival, circus, procession, drama, living nativity,… and what could be described as a practice of gathering – collective, family, association, troupe – as a privileged artistic tool for celebrating freedom, transformation, and emancipation.

In a time marked by divisions and fractures, Pauline Curnier Jardin’s work emerges as a powerful ally: it disrupts all logic of exclusion to give shape to a society in which fiction and reality, past and present, the intimate and the collective, collide and reinforce one another creating a reality that is as complex as it is joyful. 

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A living archive of twenty years of artistic practice

The exhibition brings together a broad range of works created by the artist between 2006 and 2024. It features sculptures and assemblages, a presentation of drawings, and a selection of major scenographic installations that have contributed to the artist’s renown. For the first time, more than twenty films directed by Curnier Jardin will be simultaneously on display, allowing visitors to discover the wide variety of cinematic genres the artist explores and experiments with.

A new work commissioned for the occasion will also be presented: a series of photographic portraits paying tribute to the protagonists of Pauline Curnier Jardin’s universe. Among them are both people and characters. For instance: the artist’s grandmother, Bernadette Soubirou, members of the Feel Good Cooperative – an artistic collective of Colombian transgender sex workers in Rome initiated by the artist, or the artist’s long-time assistant-babysitter-collaborator. All have played a vital role in empowering, inspiring, supporting, or transmitting elements of her work.

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Open stage

The exhibition will also include an open stage featuring a diverse programme of live events: lectures and talks by guest theorists and researchers, roundtable discussions led by local associations, artistic performances, and film screenings.

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Curator: Anne-Claire Schmitz