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.

Public Programme

The public programme extends the exhibition’s themes into a wider exploration of feminist, queer, and mythic representation. Through screenings, talks, and gatherings, the exhibition becomes a living forum for speculation and solidarity, a space where ritual, resistance, and film history converse.

Guided Tours

Every last Sunday of the month at 2 pm, during Dendy Sundays, a guided tour is offered by someone from the house, from curator to volunteer or member of Young NW.
Dates: 30/11, 21/12, 25/1, 22/2 and 29/3.

Also on View

Dress to Kill is part of a double exhibition dedicated to Pauline Curnier Jardin, organised in collaboration with M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp). From 10 October 2025 to 25 January 2026, your exhibition ticket also grants access to The Associations of Pauline Curnier Jardin at M HKA, which brings together twenty years of her practice: films, drawings, sculptures, scenographic installations, a new series of photographic portraits, and a stage for live performances.

Jeanet Film Adulte is co-produced by Steirischer Herbst.

The exhibition is supported by the City of Aalst, the French Embassy in Belgium, and the Institut français, within the framework of EXTRA—a programme promoting French contemporary creation in Belgium.