Pauline Curnier Jardin
Fat to Ashes, 2021

Artist
Pauline Curnier Jardin

Title
Fat to Ashes

Year of creation
2021

Technology and duration
HD video (16mm and Super 8 film, digitized), color. 5.1 surround sound, 20:55 min, Edition of 5/2AP, Patron Edition

Year of acquisition
2022

Flesh, skin, wax, confetti, blood, intestines, scents, senses, smoke, ritual, alcohol, excess, touch, song, fat and ash: these are some of the soft, rough, gentle, coarse materials with which the artist Pauline Curnier Jardin in her work. Her filmic and installation language often takes up ancient, mythical narratives, which she deconstructs and breaks through.

“Fat to Ashes” combines three cinematic snapshots: a religious festival in honor of Saint Agatha, the slaughter of a pig and the Cologne Carnival. The exhibition title refers to a week of debauchery from the so-called “Fat Thursday”, or “giovedì grasso”, or Weiberfastnacht or Fettdonnerstag in German, to Ash Wednesday as a day of disillusionment and the beginning of Lent according to the Christian calendar year.

Jardin shows these three spaces of action as places of transgression and transformation, in which a social function of encounters, performative displays and the exalted detachment from applicable norms continues from cultic customs to the present.

Text: SMB