#91: Pauline Curnier Jardin

“I have this cosmological tendency, I always want to create a universe, a universe that itself has this naive ambition to confound the logic that divides human and nonhuman, rationality and emotion, sacred and profane, ally and enemy, masculine and feminine, showing instead how each is capable of interacting and combining, how each has alternatives, possibilities, and the freedom to do wonderful things.  

In my previous film and staged works I have revisited, Joan of Arc, Bernadette Soubirou, the Goddess Demeter, The birth of Jesus and his Saint Family, the Anatomic Theatre of the Renaissance, the dark side of the same Renaissance, the specters of World Wars, exploitation and destruction that haunt the European past and present. My so-called baroque, grotesque and at times dark aesthetics mix influences from B-movies, folklore, dance, anarchy and epic poetry, catholic and pagan ritual, realness of the streets and village parties, drawing inspiration from earlier experimental film-makers to nowadays contemporaries, but also from the innumerous and nameless creators of popular culture and from Nature herself.” – Pauline Curnier Jardin

Pauline Curnier Jardin will show:

Teetotum, 2017, 3 min
In this very short film, Teetotum, Pauline Curnier Jardin staged the vicious and colorful games that a group of children play while their mother is trying to relax in the garden.

Cœurs de Silex (Hearts of Flint), 16 mm transfered in HD,  2012, 40 min
An ally, an occupant, a witch, a mystic, a trainer and a violent child. This movie is inspired by the traumatic history of a little suburbian french city : Noisy-le-Sec, bombed by the allies in 1944.
The six characters build up together a funny and scathing epic in a non-time, post apocalyptic, pre-apocalytic, a time of crisis where only earth is allowed to eat.

Explosion ma baby, super 8 transferred on HD, 2016, 8 min
It’s August. Feel the suffocating heat of the sun penetrating your skin. All around you, an abundance of flesh is spinning. Thousands of men offer up the naked bodies of baby boys to the angelic icon of San Sebastian. Screams, colours, chants and explosions. Money-garlands. Imagine no women except me. Wait, yes, behind us women are following with devotion, all dressed up in well pressed clothes and their stocking feet. Now, come back here. Imagine how badly I fell in love with this. I desperately want to be part of it. To be there. I wanted to belong. But I know that I can’t. And so I try to capture it on film. I go there and film it every year, over and over, again and again.

Grotta Profunda les humeurs du gouffre (Grotta Profunda the moody chasms), 2011, 28min
Bernadette Soubirous, the holy visionnary from Lourdes, once see and hear an invisible and religious Something which encourages her to look for the Truth about the origins of Humanity inside a deep cave instead of taking its apparition as a response. That’s when a strange crowd poped up on her way in the grotto.

 

Pauline Curnier Jardin (b.1980 in Marseilles, France) is an artist, filmmaker and performer who lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Along with many degrees, awards and scholarships (ENSAPC and ENSAD in Paris, Goldrauschkunstlerinnen Projekt Stipendium in Berlin, M.F.A Sciences and Technics at the Swedish University of Linköpping) she completed the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten residency in Amsterdam in 2015-2016.  She leads the seminar ‘OPERA CORRUPTION » at the Dutch Art Institute together with If I can’t Dance, I Cannot be a Part of your Revolution and semiotician-curator Sara Giannini, and this year she is guest teacher at the Kassel Kunsthochschule.

Her installation Grotta Profunda Appronfundita was on display at the 57th Venice Biennale curated by Christine Macel. Her work has travelled internationnally in festival, biennales, museums and galleries, including Tate Modern, Performa15 NYC Biennale, Museum of Modern Art of Paris, PSM Gallery in Berlin, Palais de Tokyo, M.I.T List Visual Arts Center of Cambridge, ZKM of Karlsruhe, MIGROS Museum in Zurich, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin, FUTURA in Praha, Museum of Contemporary USP São Paulo.

This past year she was laureate of the french Prize d’Entreprise Fondation Ricard pour l’Art Contemporain, then commissioned by Frieze Film and Channel 4 to realized Teetotum (a three minutes long film broadcasted on tv ) and made her first solo exhibition at Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam. With her last film« Explosion ma Baby » released in 2016 after 5 years of collecting footages she won several prizes in internationnal film festivals (Age D’Or Prize in Aged’or Film festival of Brussels, Outra Mirada Prize at Verín IFFF, Otto d’Ame Prize at Firenze Schemo dell’arte) and presented it in numerous cinema exhibited projects and film festival all over the world, including the International Film Festival in Rotterdam in 2017.