Pauline Curnier: Puor la peau de Jessica Rabbit

This exhibition is an opportunity to immerse oneself in the universe of plastic works and films by Pauline Curnier Jardin. It is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in France. Several installations have been tailor-made for the spaces of the Crac Occitanie, making it possible to discover films, drawings and images inside a reconstructed Roman amphitheatre, inside a giant placenta, in an archaeological diorama or passing between the legs of a giantess.

Pauline Curnier Jardin is a visual artist, filmmaker and performer who draws on a vast repertoire of references, ranging from Greco-Roman mythology to folk tales, from various religious practices to pagan rituals. Her films and installations, which she often conceives of as theatrical stages, reflect spaces of play or popular entertainment, such as circuses, cabarets, carnivals or funfairs, worlds in which all identities, all kinds of disguises and inversions are allowed. In a kind of wild and organic ethnology, Pauline Curnier Jardin documents various rituals: processions, pilgrimages, votive festivals…

Her vocabulary derives as much from extravaganzas as it does from horror or Z-movies, and is populated by strange, grotesque and uncategorisable characters, or marginal figures who wander on the fringes of cities and social and gender norms.

The historical or mythological characters at the centre of some films (Saint Agatha, Bernadette Soubirous) are revisited, becoming figures that challenge generally accepted ideas and stereotypes, exposing the viewer to borderline states that derail our understanding of norms and good taste.