A singular kind of anticipation swept through towns when the circus arrived – not just excitement, but a sense of disquiet, as if a sudden rupture in the ordinary was imminent. Overnight, colorful tents sprang up, children stayed out late with the promise of marvels, and the familiar streets took on an air of strangeness, as if the rules of everyday life were momentarily suspended and the village allowed itself to forget its routine.
Pauline Curnier Jardin’s exhibition “Deep Scarlet, Scream Ruby (The Freestanding Joys)” evokes this same atmosphere of enchantment, rupture, and release. For her first institutional presentation in Portugal, curated by João Laia at Galeria Municipal do Porto, the French artist reimagines the circus not only as a space of joy and excess, but as one of resistance and radical reinvention – where the marginalized can claim center stage.
Visitors enter the show immersed in a soft pink glow, a dreamlike filter that envelops the space. Within this surreal environment, flickering lights and colorful neons punctuate the presence of expansive works — a landscape where playfulness merges with a subtle sense of the uncanny. The exhibition builds this immersive world and its narrative through a selection of recent large-scale installations, which the artist calls “Freestanding Joys,” developed in collaboration with Rachel Garcia. These works function as stages, shelters, or strange celebratory monuments – both as environments for viewing Curnier Jardin’s films and as exuberant stand-alone pieces.
The first work encountered is Hot Flashes Forest (2019), a whimsical path lined with painted trees that leads to a ghostly vinyl silhouette resembling a woman’s body. The installation repurposes a former theater set, hinting at the ways opera, stagecraft, and other performance traditions animate Curnier Jardin’s practice.
Nearby, Luna Kino (2022) presents the supine sculpture of a woman, her gaze anguished and mouth choked by a viscous black substance that partially submerges her body. Before her, a projection shows blood slowly trickling down a white sheet strung on a washing line — a short but potent video that offers different answers for the voiceless tension in the sculpture. The work draws inspiration from Luna-Lichtspiegel, a nearly all-female-run cinema in Berlin that remained open during World War II, and from the women who lived through that era – an age of paradoxical coexistence between entertainment, liberation, and wartime devastation. The installation channels these histories, conjuring spectral presences that speak to the complex legacies of female agency, spectacle, and trauma.
The motif of blood — both an end and a beginning — is threaded throughout Tunnel of Love (2019). This installation leads the viewer toward a massive flower bouquet, inside which is screened the film Qu’un Sang Impur (2019): a campy, absurd, and at times unsettlingly brilliant remake of Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950). While Genet’s original depicted longing and desire between two male prisoners, Curnier Jardin’s version replaces the homoerotic tension with a gang of four murderous grannies, who bleed between their legs before committing a series of killings. This menopausal revenge fantasy places the often overlooked bodies of older women at its center, reframing menopause not as a decline but as a potentially liberating rupture.
At the end of the exhibition space stands a large-scale installation crafted from pink-salmon fabric — a reimagined Colosseum that hovers between a Cinecittà stage set, Felliniesque whimsy, and a giant colorful cake. In place of the original’s classical marble rigidity, this version is all about softness and shimmer, constructed from pastel textiles that lend tenderness and play to its iconic form. While the Colosseum historically symbolizes both architectural splendor and imperial violence, Curnier Jardin’s irreverent salmon-pink reinterpretation recalls feminist gestures — like activists splashing pink paint at contested monuments — to challenge historical narratives and reclaim spaces once used to exalt domination and violence.
Unlike earlier installations, which felt more autonomous, this one directly enhances the film it houses. Inside, Fat to Ashes (2021) explores European, Christian, and pagan traditions: the carnival in Cologne, the slaughter of a pig, and the Sant’Agata procession in Catania. Bells ring as the screening begins, and a crowd gathers on the amphitheater steps, echoing the communal experiences documented in the film. The installation and video converge into a shared moment of release, closing the circus while affirming that certain traditions — whether sacred or secular, celebratory or contradictory — still serve as vital spaces for irrationality, catharsis, and the exuberant affirmation of life.
