Ami, 2009

Pauline Curnier Jardin is a multimedia artist in the genres of graphics, performance, music, installation, and video. The common thread running through her artistic productions, which are inspired by her experience in the theater, is an idiosyncratic sense of storytelling intimately connected to the hidden performative potential of images, found objects, and art pieces. Curnier Jardin’s “patchwork narrations” create adventures and universes out of ready-made elements, which are then granted new imaginative vitality.
In her video installation Ami [Friend], the artist shows her own photographic collection of artworks and artifacts from art, ethnological, and natural museums. Considered as lifelong friends, these objects are presented one after the other, a sort of “love collage.” Now set in a new constellation, these otherwise motionless museum objects are reactivated and rediscovered as characters in an erotic story line. The viewer’s gaze is captured by the sexual detail in the sculptures while a ghostly piano motif recalls the nostalgic atmosphere of museums as archives of human production. By alternating images of internationally renowned works of art with so-called ethnic crafts, Curnier Jardin also hints at the controversial and unsolved question of artistic legitimation. (SG)