Jesse Darling is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, text, sound and performance. He lives and works between London and Berlin.
His work is broadly concerned with what it means to be a body in the world, though what that means is both politically charged and culturally determined. His practice draws on his own experience as well as the narratives of history and counterhistory. To be a body is to be inherently vulnerable, which extends to the “mortal” quality of empires and ideas as a form of precarious optimism - nothing and no-one is too big to fail, and this for Jesse Darling is the starting point for a practice in which fallibility and fungibility are acknowledged as fundamental qualities in living beings, societies and technologies. Imagining the ‘high church of the modern’ as a moveable or precarious tabernacle, Jesse Darling’s works and writing feature an array of free-floating consumer goods, liturgical devices, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols detached from the architectures, hierarchies and taxonomies in which they have their place.Jesse Darling’s recent projects include the participation at 58th Venice Biennale, Venice (2019), a solo show ‘Crevé’ at Triangle France - Astérides, Marseille (2019), a solo show as part of Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2018), a participation in ‘A Cris Ouverts’, Biennale d’art contemporain, Rennes (2018) and in ‘Metarmophõseõn’, Galerie Sultana, Paris (2018).Jesse Darling has received commissions from MoMA Warsaw, The Serpentine Gallery and Volksbuhne Berlin among others. Their past solo exhibitions include ‘Support Level’, Chapter, New York (2018), ‘Armes Blanches: History is Other People’ at Galerie Sultana, Paris (2017) and ‘The Great Near’ at Arcadia Missa, London (2016), as well as duo exhibition ‘Atrophilia’ with Phoebe Collings-James at Company Gallery,New York (2016) and group exhibitions as part of ‘Give Up the Ghost’, Baltic Triennial 13, Tallin (2018), ‘Docile Bodies’, Vitrine, London (2018) and Glasgow International (2018). JD has published texts in print and online including The Best British Poetry 2015 (Salt Press); Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2015); Art After the Internet (Cornerhouse Books, 2014).
