Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.

Pauline Curnier Jardin, FR

Qu’un Sang Impur (video, 2019) began as a loose remake of Jean Genet’s only realised film Un Chant d’Amour [Song of Love, 1950], a homoerotic love story about prison inmates that transpires under the yearning gaze of a sadistic guard. In Curnier Jardin’s film, the young male bodies are replaced with postmenopausal women. Having escaped the endless reproductive loop, they are now ‘off the market’ as Virginie Despentes would say. This liberation enables them to celebrate a newfound erotic power. Here, the artist ascribes a special power to this stage in a woman’s life, uncoupled from being an object of desire.