Allumer, 2024

Pauline Curnier Jardin and Feel Good Cooperative, Espacio Temporal, Paris, FR, June – July 2024

Allumer in French means “to light up” but also “to provoke”, a provocation of anger as well as desire. Feel Good Cooperative’s first Paris exhibition opens with an evocation of the lights and shadows of cities, the gesture of illuminating, the desire to be seen in new lights. 

As you enter, you are enveloped in bewitching red fabrics; it is these curtains that mark the passage between the three rooms that make up the exhibition, and as you continue, the lights gradually become softer and the atmosphere more intimate.

The space in which the visitor is welcomed brings into dialogue three works that seem to allude to three forms of worship and different ritual practices.
The Death of the Pope recounts the Feel Good Cooperative’s visit to Pope Benedict XVI’s funeral chamber at St. Peter’s, in an installation in which the space of the sacristy mingles with the domesticity of yesteryear and pontifical sumptuousness with the tawdriness of popular devotion.
To the right of the installation, two Mirrors of Desires (signed by Giuli Mira) invite you to look through them: you will see yourself reflected in a mask of condom packets, or in a dull gaze of plastic circles, you will feel caressed by fake nails and silicone hands, and you will discover the words of desire of adoring customers.
On the left, inside a shrine draped in red velvet, we find Alexandra Lopez’s Untitled, a statuette of an angelic trans figure in which the Nike of Samothrace seems to meet Victoria’s Secret angels and drag aesthetics.

Behind the scarlet curtain of The Death of the Pope, the Feel Good Cooperative presents its first series of Parisian drawings.
On the occasion of the exhibition at Espacio Temporal, the Feel Good Cooperative organised a new atelier: this time, the artists experimented together with white chalk and drew inside the halls of the Musée d’Orsay, letting themselves be inspired by works such as Manet’s Olympia, Degas’s Opera dancers and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s cabaret dancers. In a play of reversals and mirroring, the works of the Feel Good Cooperative reshape the image of Paris as a city of great artists and red lights, interweaving centuries, personal histories and artistic passions with 19th century male painters as well as their models.

In a third space, darker and filtered by the colour of this soft architecture, we see the film Fireflies by Pauline Curnier Jardin, starring the girls of the Cooperative. A poetic work of appearance and night, of flashes, bodies and luminescence, whose delicate sound creates the soundtrack of the entire exhibition.

View of the exhibition Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative, Allumer, Espacio Temporal, Paris, FR
Curated by Sofia Lanusse and Iván Argote
Photos: Nicolas Brasseur