Photography by Eline Willaert, courtesy of NW Aalst.
This autumn, NW presents Dress to Kill, a solo exhibition by French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille). Working across film, installation, performance, drawing, and painting, Curnier Jardin weaves together mythology, ritual, and spectacle into sensorial works where gender, power, and collectivity are staged and contested. Her practice inhabits the charged space between seduction and repulsion, where the grotesque, the carnivalesque, and the sacred meet.
Dress to Kill explores clothing as a political and subversive language. Bringing together recent installations and films, the exhibition considers costume, disguise, and performativity as strategies of resistance and self-representation. The title nods to Brian De Palma’s 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill, itself a baroque homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which the gaze, the body, and the camera become entangled in a choreography of desire and violence. In Curnier Jardin’s work, this tension shifts from the cinematic to the ritual and collective realm, where questions of visibility, identity, and power unfold anew.
Developed in close collaboration with the residents and communities of Aalst, Dress to Kill centres on Jeanet Film Adulte, a new film commission. Here, the local carnival serves as a mirror of society: a space of liberation and parody, but also of repetition and exclusion. Within this ambivalent terrain, Curnier Jardin probes how images and bodies are shaped, questioned, and reclaimed.
Unfolding as a world of symbolic reversals and ritual transformations, Dress to Kill immerses viewers in a lush scenography of flowers, fabrics, bodies, and voices. The result is a feminist imaginary where vulnerability and strength, collectivity and difference, are in constant interplay.
