Dress to Kill, 2025

Pauline Curnier Jardin, NW, Open House for Contemporary Art and Film, Aalst, BE, Oct 2025 – March 2026

Dress to Kill explores clothing as a political and subversive language. Bringing together recent installations and films, the exhibition considers costume, disguise, and performativity as strategies of resistance and self-representation. The title nods to Brian De Palma’s 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill, itself a baroque homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which the gaze, the body, and the camera become entangled in a choreography of desire and violence. In Curnier Jardin’s work, this tension shifts from the cinematic to the ritual and collective realm, where questions of visibility, identity, and power unfold anew.

Developed in close collaboration with the residents and communities of Aalst, Dress to Kill centres on Jeanet Film Adulte, a new film commission. Here, the local carnival serves as a mirror of society: a space of liberation and parody, but also of repetition and exclusion. Within this ambivalent terrain, Curnier Jardin probes how images and bodies are shaped, questioned, and reclaimed.

Unfolding as a world of symbolic reversals and ritual transformations, Dress to Kill immerses viewers in a lush scenography of flowers, fabrics, bodies, and voices. The result is a feminist imaginary where vulnerability and strength, collectivity and difference, are in constant interplay.

Exhibition curated by Laura Herman and Godart Bakkers
The exhibition is supported by the City of Aalst, the French Embassy in Belgium, and the Institut français, within the framework of EXTRA—a programme promoting French contemporary creation in Belgium.
Exhibition views: Annelien Vermeir