What one does for love—Was man aus Liebe tut—is an act of devotion. It is a “labour of love”, like clasping your hands around ruins, with the weight of a vow and the burden of your social role; it’s the elegance of a ribbon that hides the dust in your hair, it’s a beautiful smile toward the photographer who’s there to prove your pleasure, it’s the sorority used for the nationalist propaganda; it’s the bending of your body, the arching of your back; the raising of your own flesh and blood to sainthood.
In Pauline Curnier Jardin’s solo exhibition at Grisebach Switzerland in Zurich, part of the third iteration of Grisebach’s Travel logs series, the French artist has taken elements from three existing installations to direct attention toward our collective acts of devotion. Gathering bas-reliefs and limp, faux leather figures, she explores women’s wage-based and reproductive labor as well the transactional rituals of Faith.
From her 2022 installation Luna Kino, five ashy-toned bas-reliefs line the walls like movie posters, advertising the story of Germany’s trümmerfrauen (rubble women). Presenting women tasked to clear the wreckage that littered German cities, these artworks explore the parameters of how images of women’s bodies were used in political propaganda after the Second World War. The documentation of their efforts, met with little salary, became a tool to promote social unity and a strong work ethic. As such, these women were symbolically employed to foster national resilience and the rebirth of the country. Based on these archival materials, Pauline Curnier Jardin has sculpted these women as they were depicted: wearing nylon stockings, heels, and headscarves. However, Curnier Jardin’s figures exhibit varying degrees of fear and exhaustion, reflecting the tension between the glorification of their roles and the appropriation of the female body for political and social manipulation.
The loose, stretched-out female figures in Curnier Jardin’s Peaux de dame series (2018–2022) evoke a different phase of life, symbolized through skinsuits that subtly reference the folk tale Peau d'âne. These figures are not confrontational; instead, they are loose in the way women's skin naturally slackens with age. This slackening conveys a sense of comfort as their bodies sprawl, arms and legs spreading widely, claiming all available space. It's as though they are liberated from the constraints of womanhood—what French writer Virginie Despentes might describe as freedom from the ‘market.’ These figures shed the patriarchal constructs that once defined them, their sagging skin becoming a mark of release rather than decline. They revel in their newfound flexibility, not just of body but of identity, liberated from the biological limitations that once confined them.
As her final piece for the exhibition, Curnier Jardin presents a bas-relief transforming a still from her 2023 film Explosion Ma Baby into a three-dimensional object. Looking into sacrifices of Catholic rituals, the bas-relief and the film reimagine the St. Sebastian procession in Sicily. Putting emphasis on the extravagance of the annual ritual where young fathers present their babies decorated with garlands of cash to the statue of St. Sebastian clad only in a loincloth, Curnier Jardin reproduces a scene showing these garlands mid-flight. Her distinctive representational logic confronts the viewer with this donation made in exchange for blessing and a custom configured within notions of youthfulness, purity, and innocence.
Endlessly unsettling daily rituals, Curnier Jaridin’s artistic practice seeks to distort historical events, rituals and norms to think beyond existing power dynamics. Looking closer at these varied acts of devolution and sacrifices, she reinterprets societal narratives—turning how we view conventions and traditions upside-down and skew.
