Fat to Ashes
Artist: Pauline Curnier Jardin
Producer: Jacqui Davies
Film Installation
Shown at the Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof April to September 2021.
After over a year of isolation and fear, FAT TO ASHES catapults us back into a Europe of celebration, feasts, crowds, bodies, laughter, shouts, songs and prayers - and the searing beauty and brutality of religion, culture and life itself - both historical and contemporary.
In her solo exhibition FAT TO ASHES the winner of the 2019 Preisder National Galerie Pauline Curnier Jardin creates and arena within the Hamberger Bahnhof where her vivid film installation takes us on a journey from Saint Agata to Cologne Carnival to traditional animal slaughter, a world where butchery, brutality, devotion and celebration collide.
The Arena has come to embody ideas of European civilization and achievement, a place of worship, democracy, community, athletic attainment, procession, entertainment and celebration. It has also acted as a site of brutal contest, authoritarianism, punishment, butchery and slaughter in a multitude of forms from ancient gladiators and slaves fighting to the death and public executions to contemporary bullfighting, from fascist rallies for the promotion of war, to public dissection of corpses in anatomical theatres.
For her solo exhibition, Pauline Curnier Jardin constructs her own arena, within the cavernous exhibition hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof. This arena, part cake, part stage or film set, becomes the site for spectacle and the presentation of a new immersive installation — depicting acts of ritual, devotion, adoration, procession, butchery and slaughter — “Fat to Ashes”.
