Visual artist
Pauline Curnier Jardin (born 1980, Marseille, France) is a visual artist working mainly in film, installation, performance and drawing. She lives in Rome and Berlin.[1] In her work, Curnier Jardin has revisited Joan of Arc, Bernadette Soubirous, the Goddess Demeter, the birth of Jesus and his saint Family, the Anatomical theatre of the Renaissance, as well as pagan and catholic rites in Central and Southern Europe. In 2019 she was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie [de].[2]
Early life and education
Curnier Jardin studied fine art at École Nationale des Beaux Arts de Paris-Cergy and film studies at École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, Paris. Together with Maeva Cunci,[3] Virginie Thomas et Aude Lachaise she founded the dada-femme Cabaret group "Les Vraoums".[4]
Career
She was a visiting tutor at Kunsthochschule Kassel and at the Dutch Art Institute[5] where she led the seminar "Opera Corruption" together with the art organization If I can't Dance, I Cannot be a Part of your Revolution[6] and curator Sara Giannini.[7][8] Since 2020 Curnier Jardin has been tutor at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.
In 2020, together with Alexandra Lopez and Serena Olcuire, she initiated the Feel Good Cooperative, a cooperative of sex-workers in Rome.[9]
In the film-work Grotta Profunda, les humeurs de gouffre, the moody chasm (2011) Curnier Jardin explores the life of Bernadette Soubirous (Maria Bernada Sobeirons), the Pyrenean visionary, who on 11 February 1858 claimed she saw a young girl in a cave at Massabielle.
Her subsequent film Grotta Profunda, les humeurs du gouffre was exhibitied as part of the installation Grotta Profunda Approfundita[10] at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Her film Qu'un Sang Impur, a loose remake of Jean Genet's "Un Chant d'Amour", was commissioned for the Bergen Assembly Triennal[11] and later exhibited at the Hamburger Bahnhof, installed in the Hot Flashes Forest, an immersive installation thought to combine a multiple of works that deal with reproductive idea of the woman's body.[1]
As the winner of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2019,[12] Curnier Jardin presented the extensive video installation Fat to Ashes[13] at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, in 2021. The exhibition was centred on the filmic work «Fat to Ashes» which combines 3 storylines: a religious festival in honour of St. Agatha, the slaughter of a pig, and the carnival in Cologne.
A large-scale amphitheatre encompasses the film installation as the centre of the spectacle, and thus transformations, processions, and practised performance in ritualised excess are the content and formal attributes of Curnier Jardin's Fat to Ashes.[14]
