
[EXHIBITION]
QUENTIN TARANTINO: CHAPTER BY CHAPT
A Non-Linear Exhibition on the Cinema of Quentin Tarantino
Role: Curator - Conceptual & Spatial Design
Year: 2026
Duration: 6 months
PROJECT OVERVIEW
This project is a speculative curatorial proposal developed as a demonstration of curatorial methodology, spatial thinking, and critical writing on film culture. All objects listed in the checklist are proposed items; this document does not represent a confirmed institutional agreement or loan.
CURATORIAL APPROACH
EXHIBITION JOURNEY
01
Ticket Booth
Entry designed as a cinema ritual.
04
Retro Room
1960s cinema, archival material, and garments.
02
Trailer Room
Commissioned film introducing the exhibition narrative.
05
Future Room
Speculative environment of metal, light, and projection.
03
Bar Souvenir
Candy bar, coffee shop and Paco Rabanne books, gifts or souvenirs
06
Cinema
Screenings of five films featuring Rabanne designs.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
QUENTIN TARANTINO: CHAPTER BY CHAP
Chapter by Chapter begins in the middle of a story. There is no orientation room, no chronological guide, no single corridor leading from one conclusion to the next. Visitors enter a universe already in motion — one constructed from six actors, seven spaces, and the radical proposition that a story told out of order is not a broken story, but a truer one.
Quentin Tarantino's cinema has always resisted the comfort of sequence. His films do not move from A to B — they move from a moment of consequence, backward to its cause, then sideways into something that should not logically connect but feels, emotionally, as if it must. This exhibition takes that logic as its architecture. Six actors who have shaped the Tarantino universe — Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, Michael Madsen, Kurt Russell — each occupy a room named after the archetype they embody: The Conversation, The Woman, The Table, The Outlaw, The Dogs, The Ghost. These rooms do not follow one another. They surround each other. Every door leads to another story. Every exit is also an entrance.
What binds these six figures is not franchise, not genre, but the specific quality of Tarantino's attention: his insistence that a character's interior life — their history, their contradictions, their relationship to language — is the only subject worth filming. Samuel L. Jackson said of their collaboration that Tarantino's films are "character-driven" in a way that distinguishes them categorically from event-driven cinema. This exhibition tries to make that character-drivenness visible — not through plot summary or homage, but through the material conditions of inhabiting a room. You do not watch these characters. You move through the space they left behind.


Metal couture operates here as both material and metaphor. Constructed rather than sewn, Rabanne’s garments function as structures that echo architecture, machinery, and cinematic sets. In film, these structures are activated by movement, light, and sound, revealing fashion not as a static object but as a performative system. Cinema allows Rabanne’s work to exist in time, restoring rhythm, gesture, and narrative to clothing.
The exhibition unfolds as a cinematic journey. Visitors do not move chronologically, but narratively, passing through spaces that mirror the grammar of film. Entry is framed as arrival at a cinema, establishing spectatorship as a curatorial device. A trailer introduces Rabanne’s universe through montage, sound, and projection, situating the visitor within a hybrid space between fashion exhibition and film screening.


From there, the exhibition divides into two temporal conditions.
The first engages the 1960s as a moment of cultural rupture, experimentation, and political change. Archival film material, vintage cinematic tools, and garments situate Rabanne within a decade that reimagined the body and its freedoms. The second space projects forward. Here, metal, reflection, and moving image construct a speculative environment, echoing Rabanne’s vision of futurity as something structural rather than decorative.
Cinema remains present throughout. Films such as "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?" and "Barbarella" are not presented as references, but as active components of the exhibition. Their imagery informs spatial design, soundscapes, and material choices, allowing fashion and film to operate as a single system. The screening room functions not as an endpoint, but as a return to origin, where the visitor encounters Rabanne’s work in its fully activated state.
By immersing the visitor within cinematic space, the exhibition challenges conventional fashion display. Garments are not isolated artifacts but participants within a larger visual and temporal framework. The body, both dressed and spectating, becomes central. Movement through space echoes movement on screen, collapsing the distance between observer and object.
Ultimately, Paco Rabanne: Metal, Cinema, Futurity reframes the designer’s legacy as one of authorship across media. It argues that Rabanne did not simply anticipate the future aesthetically; he constructed it structurally. Through cinema, fashion became speculative architecture for the body, capable of imagining new ways of inhabiting time, space, and identity.