During the first Italian confinement of 2020, Pauline Curnier Jardin collected and edited a series of videos from a Facebook group of ethnomusicologists. The scenes show different Easter masses and processions in Catholic Europe, mostly in Italy. In a lockdown society, religious ceremonies and rituals could not be done collectively, forcing believers to attend them virtually. Curnier Jardin amassed a rich archive of ritualistic footage from before and during confinement and created a polyphonic compilation of collective religious emotion.
Pauline Curnier Jardin develops a powerful empathy for believers which can be seen in the way her films restore a carnal presence in the world. Alternately fiery and baroque, kitsch and sensual, erotic and bloody, the work of Pauline Curnier Jardin analyses in action the societal structures specific to the communities of southern Europe. Far from any objectification, the filmic eye of Pauline Curnier Jardin examines behaviours and beliefs in a way that favours action over concept, lived experience over bookish knowledge.
In a tripartite structure, at the crossroads of a church confessional, a domestic space and a camping site, the film is broadcast on a television that seems to take the place of the altar and the officiant.
Religious rites mingle with mundane ones. The television, the filmic eye, the gaze of the believer/spectator and the confessional window intertwine in a complex web of scopic devices. The panopticon, the confessional and the dinette merge into each other.
Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille, France) is an Berlin-Rome based artist working across installation, performance, film and drawing. Selected solo and group exhibitions, commissioned projects and screenings include: CRAC Occitanie, Sète, FR (2022), FRAC Corsica (2022), Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2022), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, DE (2022) LIAF, Venice (2022), Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, DE (2021), INDEX – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, SE (2021), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2020). Curnier Jardin is the winner of the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie and recipient of the 2019/2020 Villa Medici Residency in Rome and the 2021 Villa Romana Fellows in Florence. She was the winner of the Dutch prize NN Award (2018) and laureate of the Prix Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard (2017).
