Jesse Darling is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, text, sound and performance. They live and work in Berlin.

Their 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. Their practice draws on their 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 noone is too big to fail, and this for JD 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, JD’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.

JD’s recent projects include the participation at the 58th Venice Biennale, Venice (2019), a solo show ‘Crevé’ at Triangle France - Astérides, Marseille (2019), a solo show ‘The Ballade of Saint Jerome’ 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).

JD 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).

Download Full CV.