The winner of the 2019 Nationalgalerie Prize is showing the expansive video installation “Fat to Ashes”, created on the occasion of her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, in the Historical Hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Aktuell – Berlin. A spacious amphitheater encompasses the video installation as the center of the spectacle and so transformation, procession and practiced performance in ritualized excess are the content-related and formal attributes of Pauline Curnier Jardin's “Fat to Ashes”.
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.