Deep Scarlet, Scream Ruby / The freestanding Joys
Curated by Joao Laia
Galería Municipal do Porto, Porto
29 March – 8 June 2025

In her first exhibition in Portugal, French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin conjures the image of a traveling circus arriving to town — a fantastical, unruly spectacle that channels the anarchic energy of carnival. Working across film, installation, drawing, and performance, Curnier Jardin creates immersive environments where rituals of reversal, excess, and disruption take center stage. Her work draws on religious pageantry, folk traditions, and subcultural aesthetics to explore power, desire, and transformation.

Deep Scarlet, Scream Ruby invites us into a world that is grotesque, garish, and at times comical — a space where normative boundaries collapse. Across multiple film installations and sculptural elements, Curnier Jardin foregrounds the female body not only as a site of spectacle but as a locus of agency and resistance. Her practice resonates with feminist and queer positions, using performance and cinematic narrative to subvert patriarchal myths and dominant histories.

At the heart of the exhibition is The Freestanding Joys, a larger-than-life entity that frames the show as a collective, carnivalesque journey rather than a solitary artistic act. Curnier Jardin’s collaborative approach — involving set designer Rachel Garcia and project manager Martina Silvi, among others — underscores the communal spirit of her work. Her installations operate as dynamic spaces of joy, introspection, and revolt, where viewers are invited to become participants in a ritual of transformation.

Rather than offering fixed answers, Curnier Jardin opens up alternative mythologies and cyclical narratives that celebrate multiplicity, bodily excess, and the grotesque as tools of liberation. In a world often overwhelmed by rigid structures and linear thinking, her cinematic universes propose a radical elsewhere — a space to revel, to transgress, and ultimately, to reimagine what power and pleasure can look like.