The Associations of Pauline Curnier Jardin
Curated by Anne Claire Schmitz
M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp
9 October 2025 – 25 January 2026

This autumn, M HKA presents the first survey exhibition of French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin. The show brings together twenty years of her exuberant, hybrid art practice, featuring films, drawings, sculptures, installations, and a stage for live events. Visitors are immersed in Curnier Jardin’s unique world, where cinema, performance, and personal or collective stories merge into a festive and multi-layered whole.

The Associations of Pauline Curnier Jardin is the first survey exhibition dedicated to Pauline Curnier Jardin’s (°1980, Marseille, France) artistic career, which emerged twenty years ago at the intersection of cinema, performance and the visual arts, in close connection with the places where she has lived and worked: the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France.

The title announces a story: a story of the groups formed throughout the artist’s career, of the affinities she has forged over time, and the feminist, civic and creative commitments that have shaped her practice. The exhibition unfolds as a gathering, a reunion of people and characters, rituals and places, associating to form a hybrid practice driven by a constant search for freedom, transformation and emancipation.

Two fundamental themes characterize the work of Pauline Curnier Jardin: the exploration of practices that offer a cultural outlet, such as carnivals, travelling cinemas, circuses, processions or living nativities, and a practice of gathering — in a collective, family, community, association or troupe — that we might see as an essential and privileged tool of her life as a woman and an artist.

For the first time, an extensive collection of works from the period 2006–2024 is brought together, including more than twenty films, sculptural assemblages, a display of drawings and a selection of large-scale installations resembling stage sets that have contributed to Pauline Curnier Jardin’s renown.

The exhibition has been made possible with the support of The French Embassy in Belgium and the Institut Français