Pauline Curnier Jardin
Adoration, 2022

8 min 56 sec, video, color, stereo

On 19 April 2022, LIAF-Lofoten International Art Festival unveiled a permanent communal installation by artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (Marseille, France 1980) realised in collaboration with the inmates of the Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca, an Italian women’s prison located in the former monastery of the Convertite. Reversing institutional hierarchies, the inmates have briefed and commissioned Curnier Jardin to reshape the interior of the parlour of the prison, and to create a new film: Adoration. The film developed through collective script writing and the animation of the inmates’ drawings and self-portrait pictures, it was premiered on the big screen of the permanent installation in the parlour of the prison. The redecoration of the parlour has been inspired by Black Narcissus, a 1947 British psychological drama revolving around the growing tensions and desires within a small convent of Anglican nuns who are trying to establish a school in the old palace of an Indian Raja at the top of an isolated mountain in the Himalayas.
Curnier Jardin’s film thus reveals a hidden history related to the Venetian monastery. Recent research shows that the parlour of the religious institution was used as a theatrical stage by the nuns who occasionally performed in front of their family members and Venetian authorities. Such carnival-like performances allowed the nuns to wear profane clothes and to suspend the social rules that forced them into a monastic life.

Production and Coordination Manager: Vanessa Saraceno
Assistant: Martina Silvi
Animation and Design : Kryštof Kučera, Simona Koutna
Editing : Benni Atria
Sound editing and Sound mix : Antonio Giannantonio
Music : Real Miracolo
Styling: DROMe
Subtitles : Chiara Siravo

Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille, France) is a Berlin-Rome based artist working across film, installation, performance and drawing. She is the winner of the 2019 GermanPreis der Nationalgalerie, the 2021 Villa Romana Prize in Florence, and recipient of the 2019-2020 Villa Medici fellowship in Rome. Her art work was included or commissioned over the last years in: Lofoten International Art Festival; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz; Manifesta 13, Marseille; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Bergen Assembly, Bergen
Biennial; the 57th Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London; Performa 15, New York. Her film work has been awarded and presented in many festivals like IFFR Rotterdam, DocLisboa, or FID Marseille