Context (Pool) 1: Art & Escape

In this seminar we will look at the lexical knot escape/escapism, that contains an intricate web of meanings and possible narratives. Escape from spaces – whether mental or physical – is a moment of subversion and breaking out of cages that requires and generates creativity, that moves in and creates interstices, that provokes and nurtures stratagems.

The course will explore the notion of escape as both an artistic method and a recurring cultural fantasy. Moving across cinema, popular culture, and critical theory, it examines how acts of fleeing, disappearing, refusing, or deviating from social norms have been represented and imagined through different narratives and aesthetics. Rather than celebrating heroic individualism or romantic myths of freedom, the course is interested in collective, failed, queer, absurd, and improvised forms of escape that challenge dominant structures of power, identity, and desire.

Through a selection of films, discussions, and theoretical texts, participants will investigate escape not simply as a physical act, but as a political and imaginative practice: a way of resisting prescribed roles, inventing alternative forms of life, and rethinking the possibilities of community, pleasure, and refusal. Particular attention will be given to how popular culture stages fantasies of liberation, and how artists and filmmakers appropriate, subvert, or complicate these narratives through irony, excess, failure, and experimentation.

The course will include a number of field trips, giving students the opportunity to experience and discuss various forms of escapism.

About the lecturer:

Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille, France) is an artist working across installation, performance, film, and drawing. Her cinematic installations create unorthodox universes and tell stories, thus proposing alternative narratives. She is the winner of the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie, the 2021 Villa Romana Prize, and recipient of the 2019-2020 Villa Medici fellowship in Rome. Her work was included or commissioned most recently in: Kiasma, Helsinki (2024), MACRO, Rome (2024), Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2023), Kunsthaus Pasquart, Bienne and Kunsthalle, Winterthur (2023), CRAC Occitanie, Sète (2022); FRAC Corsica (2022); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin (2022).