Kiasma | Museum of Contemporary Art

French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin’s (b. 1980) first solo exhibition in Finland transforms Kiasma’s exhibition space into a grotesque theme park. The film works that await us in its depths offer glimpses into the fate of women and others marginalised in various ways in “entertainment” and as objects of power. What might Christian rituals, sex work and aging look like to them?

Pauline Curnier Jardin and set designer Rachel García have together created carnivalistic backdrops for the exhibition – their colours and lights draw us in. The soundscape created for the occasion generates an amusement park-like atmosphere. But, both the scenography and the sound warn us that something more ambiguous is about to emerge. The installations serve as stages for films in which entertainment and violence are intertwined. Here, the women’s bodies are an object of the exercise of power, but the women also wield and subvert power.

Curnier Jardin is interested in grandiose architecture created for spectacles of entertainment, passion and violence; one installation outwardly resembles the Colosseum, but also a giant cream cake. Two artworks dealing with sex work are sited on the peripheries of the theme park. They have been created by Curnier Jardin in collaboration with the Feel Good Cooperative, a collective founded in Rome to support sex workers.

Power relations in society appear in Curnier Jardin’s works in a lurid, at times, comical light. The exhibition deals with the role of women and marginalised groups in the European world of “entertainment” – a theme that she has worked on throughout her career. Recurrent elements include rituals, parades, religious ecstasy, carnality, violence, trauma, and sex. In the exhibition, the blood that surges out at two various points can evoke thoughts of war and violence. On the other hand, bleeding is a common part particularly of women’s ordinary lives, and, for example, of giving birth.

Curated in-house at Kiasma by Patrik Nyberg, Piia Oksanen and Max Hannus.