Emman Opens Her Jewellery Box At Acne Paper Palais Royal

For her first major solo show, Emman turns Acne Paper Palais Royal into a life-sized musical jewellery box, ballerina and all. The installation merges theatre and intimacy, pulling from memory, set design, and collage to evoke the rituals of femininity and inherited glamour.

Rooted in personal mythology, The Jewellery Box traces Emman’s heritage through South Asian bridal dowries and Catholic baroque heirlooms. As a child, she clipped necklaces from catalogues to store in a toy jewellery box; later, she learned to craft and restore real ornaments with her uncles. For her, jewellery is never just decorative—it is protection, ceremony, memory, and desire.

Ornament, Ritual, and Fluid Identities

The exhibition’s glass vitrine stages oversized trompe l’oeil collages that pair fine jewellery with cultural leftovers: beetle shells, bottle caps, sea creatures, reptiles. The result is lush and subversive, collapsing boundaries between the precious and the discarded, tradition and transformation.

The iconic ballerina figure spins at the heart of the installation, a nod to twentieth century hyper-femininity. Yet Emman complicates the silhouette, suggesting gender as fluid and adaptive, like the creatures that camouflage and defy fixed form in her collages. Digital works by HEY_REILLY push this further, animating Emman’s jewellery into moving images of Hollywood women—a shimmering assemblage of performance and adornment.

Presented as Acne Paper brought to life, The Jewellery Box is a world of ornament and meaning, illusion and intimacy, joy and camp.