The Dawn Is Red when the Dew Coagulates, 2024

Pauline Curnier Jardin, KIASMA, Helsinki, FI, Oct 2024 – Feb 2025

In the ample space offered by the museum’s fifth floor, Pauline Curnier Jardin – in collaboration with set designer Rachel Garcia – designs a twilight landscape with changing tones, composed of a series of spectacular free-standing installations. The ‘free standing joys’ are ephemeral islands of passion, self-supporting constructions floating in space without the support of the museum walls. The panorama they create questions the link between the culture, rituals and architecture of entertainment and some of the great passions of our society such as sexuality, war and religion.

The film Fat to Ashes (2021) is presented in its iconic, dripping Coliseum, within which the viewer is wrapped in sensual pink drapes and immersed in a filmic space in which three Western European rituals and traditions are swirling in dialogue: a Sicilian procession in honour of St. Agatha, the Cologne carnival and the annual sow-killing in an Italian countryside.

Presented here for the first time is Tunnel of Love (2024), a huge bouquet of flowers upturned on the ground, which inside hides an intimate viewing space for Qu’un Sang Impur (2019), a remake of Jean Genet’s iconic film Un chant d’amour in which the male prisoners of the original film are replaced by a band of elderly menopausal women. With its crooked St Valentine aesthetics, Tunnel of Love is presented here together with Hot Flashes Forest (2019) and Kuumat Kukat Lingerie (Hot Flowers Lingerie, 2024), thus creating a true landscape/attraction path around the film.

In the main hall, Luna Kino (2022) is also presented: a freestanding cinema, a stage machine with sensual and frightening shapes, encapsulating a world of spectacle and war. The installation is inspired by the true story of the Luna-Lichtspiegel cinema in Berlin, which was kept open by women during the Second World War, and interweaves this experience with other, contradictory narratives and life experiences of feminised subjectivities during that dark moment in European history.

Opening and closing the exhibition are two works that the artist created with the Feel Good Cooperative, the art collective that Curnier Jardin founded together with a group of Colombian transgender sex workers in Rome in 2020. In the first room, the work of the Cooperative is presented in a sort of peep-show, through a small window and a lighting system that is activated by a coin; at the end of the exhibition path, the scopic game is reversed and the bodies of the Cooperative artists in the film Lucciole (Fireflies, 2021) go beyond the Museum space and conquer the public space in front through a projection on the glass façade, visible only in the moments when there is no light outside. 

Exhibition curated by Patrik Nyberg, Piia Oksanen and Max Hannus.
Exhibition views:  Kansallisgalleria / Pirje Mykkänen.