Darling, Jesse

Academic background

Jesse received his BA from CSM in 2010 and his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2014. He also participated in the 58th Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2023.

Teaching

Jesse is the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Ruskin School of Art and is available for DPhil supervision.

Research interests

His research is concerned with the attempt to make visible the unconscious of European petro-colonial modernity through the history of technology and the production of ideology, or the objects and ideas with which we make up the world. In sculpture and installation he has taken up this enquiry using something like a materialist poetics to explore and reimagine the worldmaking values of that modernity. He is also interested in the role of spirituality as a structuring matrix for secular social life, and his practice takes seriously the idea that intuition, dreams, pathologies and folklore all have something important to tell us about the world. Taking vulnerability and entanglement as a fact of life lends itself to a politics and a practice of community and coalition: Darling has been part of countless community-led projects and organizations and continues to research ways of being-with as praxis. Correspondence and dialogue form an important part of his research process.

Recent Publications

VIRGINS, published by Monitor Books (2021)

SHOWGIRLS (Arcadia_Missa publishing, 2023, on the occasion of a Tate film commission for Site Visit).

Selected solo exhibitions include Enclosures at Camden Arts Center (2022), No Medals No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford (2022), Gravity Road at Kunstverein Freiburg (2022), Crevé at Triangle France Astérides (2019), and The Ballad of Saint Jerome at Tate Britain (2018—2019).