Jesse Darling

Oxford, UK, 1981

Jesse Darling is an artist and poet based in Oxford. In sculpture, installation, drawing and text, Darling destabilizes dominant narratives propped up by the likes of ideology, religion, mythology and politics, exposing a fundamental precarity in any claim to coherence. Recent works stand as the ruined relics of crumbling empires, picking up on how the (aesthetic and symbolic) pillars of (what understands itself as) western civilization converge around ideologies of the border and exclusion. Undergirded with a sharp sense of humor, his work remains committed to the messy and unfinished labor of coalition-building and collectivity. Selected solo exhibitions include Galerie Molitor, Berlin (2025, forthcoming), Petit Palais, Art Basel Paris (2024), Turner Prize, The Towner (2023), Camden Arts Center (2022), Modern Art Oxford (2022), Kunstverein Freiburg (2022), Triangle France Astérides (2019), and Tate Britain (2018—2019). Darling also participated in the 58th Venice Biennale, and was the winner of the Turner Prize 2023.

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Come on England, 2023

3 pedestrian barriers and welded steel, 110 x 660 x 119cm, 2023 and 4 pedestrian barriers, welded steel, wheels, 310 x 860 x 210cm, 2023. Courtesy of Galerie Molitor, Berlin.

In Jesse Darling’s Come on England (2023), metal barriers that are typically used to inhibit free movement are instead contorted into a kind of dancing procession. Using this incarnation of division and official control against itself, Darling reveals the inherent vulnerability in such power structures. The work conveys the flimsiness of controlling infrastructures with both humor and grief.