‘Everyone knows that Darling is an end-of-the-line monstrous war-cry kinda pseudonym, taken in defiance of a world that doesn’t love you.’
Jesse Darling is an artist and occasional writer based in London. JD works across various media including sculpture, video, installation, and text. In the broadest sense their practice is concerned with the human condition and how it is mediated through the structures, narratives and technologies that govern lived experience, knowing that what constitutes this experience is shifting along with ideas about sovereignty, gender, matter and even sentience itself. Considering the social and physical body as a site where architectural, [bio]political and social structures manifest and become transformed, Darling's recent sculptural work has sought to explore the story of colonial modernity and the military-industrial complex through the materials with which the domestic spheres of home and homeland are built and upheld.
Originally trained in dance and physical theatre, Darling is often credited as a forerunner of the 'post-internet' generation, pioneering notions of networked performativity and digital labor in between space and the screen. Influenced by their background in squatting and community projects they also founded a series of communal living and working projects in London, most recently Fondazione Non Grata in Croydon. Darling has recently published texts in the MIT Press anthology _Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century _and _Best British Poetry 2015, _and their most recent projects include a performance piece commissioned for the Serpentine Gallery's Park Nights series (_NTGNE, _2015) and some new large-scale sculptures for MoMA Warsaw. Other recent shows include GREY at Brand New Gallery, Milan (both 2016); Alive for An Instant, Galeria Stereo, Warsaw; Absolute Bearing, LD50 Gallery, London; Spirit Level (with Takeshi Shiomitsu), AND/OR Gallery, London; Devotions, MOT Projects, London; _They/Them, DREI, Cologne (all 2015). This spring they will publish a text with Former West and present a solo exhibition for Arcadia Missa in London. JD collaborates frequently and teaches at Sandberg Instituut and Spike Island in Bristol; they also work as editor-at-large for The New Inquiry.
After Art Talk:
Poster by Gilles De Brock
