A few years ago, English artist Jesse Darling was standing in the vegetable aisle of a grocery store when he had an epiphany. Looking at the plastic-wrapped produce, she suddenly felt an acute awareness of the path the items had taken to get there: from cultivation to processing, to packaging and shipping, and then to their place on the shelves.
“I just stood there confused on the spot,” he said recalled on video published last year. “I had this overwhelming sense of how fragile and precarious and absurd it was: beyond all demand and beyond all possibility.”
Darling hopes to provoke such revelations in viewers of his works, which include sculptures and installations of handmade found objects. He wants to reveal the “fairy tale” of the “nation-state, the machinery of capitalism, the structure of modernity and race and gender,” he said in a recent interview — like “when someone wears an invisibility cloak and someone throws paint or talcum powder on him and suddenly it appears.”
Last year, this approach won the Darling the Turner Prize, the prestigious British award for contemporary art whose previous winners include heavyweights such as Steve McQueen and Anish Kapoor. The victory was greeted with unusually widespread praise: An article in the Guardian called Darling’s work “full of personality, vulnerability, curious detours and unsettling conflicts”.
Darling was scheduled to open his first US exhibition after winning the Turner Prize at the NY Chapter in Lower Manhattan on July 11. He said he didn’t want to talk about the gallery show and would do most of the work at the last minute. This 11th-hour approach “was a high-risk strategy, but it’s the only way to do things for me,” he added. (On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the NY Chapter said the fair had been postponed and would likely take place in 2025.)
His Turner Prize show—also hastily assembled—featured objects that embody the ways in which both abstract ideologies, including nationalism, and concrete institutions, such as the police, shape everyday life. Agapi altered familiar objects to make them at once absurd, precarious and menacing: barricades whose legs have been welded together to resemble French-speaking figures, stacks of envelopes plastered with self-made flags, a modified roller coaster track emerging from a wall.
Martin Clarke, director of the Camden Art Center in London and a member of the jury that awarded Darling the Turner Prize, said the artist’s work captured the “degrading superiority and horror” of globalized capitalism and the power of the surveillance state. It evoked “wonder” along with “this incredibly revelatory sense of nihilism, which was timeless, but also incredibly specific to what we’re living in,” Clark said.
Many news outlets saw Darling’s Turner show as a particular commentary on economic and social decline in Britain after Brexit. However, Darling no longer lives in the country and has made his home in Berlin for most of the past seven years.
In the interview in the living room of his spacious, cluttered apartment in the city’s Neukölln district, Darling was self-critical, playfully confrontational and prone to tangential economic and political theories. He emphasized that he did not enjoy the public attention: After agreeing to an interview, he avoided and postponed a meeting for several months. When asked about his age, he said he was born in 1981, then added: “That’s actually not true.”
He also expressed ambivalence about winning the Turner Prize and the growing resistance in the art world in general. “Success in the art world doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean more money, it doesn’t mean extra, it doesn’t mean any kind of stability,” he said. Increasingly, he questioned his identity as an artist and considered leaving commercial art, he said.
Born to a schoolteacher and postman in Oxford, England, he said encounters with wealthy students at the city’s prestigious university imbued him with an early awareness of class difference. The way “these students moved their bodies left a lasting impression,” he said. After discovering that “you don’t really need to go to school,” he said, he began skipping most classes except art and moved to Amsterdam after graduation.
He ended up attending the Gerrit Rietveld Academy art school there by day and doing sex work in the city’s red light district by night. The school kicked him out after a year, he said. “The other students were these nice upper-middle-class Scandinavians, Israelis and Germans, and people were very serious about cigarettes about colored fields and feminist performance,” she said. “I lived this secret life at night and tried to survive psychologically in ways other students didn’t.”
Addicted to drugs, he ended up living in squats and working as a cook. “I was very young, quite vulnerable and addicted surrounded by addicts,” he said. But he continued to make art by making props for elaborate parties thrown by friends in Amsterdam’s left-wing activist community.
“I didn’t understand why anyone would make something for a gallery,” he said. “My work was all about my community.”
He eventually returned to Britain and enrolled in 2008 at Central Saint Martins in London, where he studied theater set design and then sculpture. He learned how to weld and began creating his found-object installations, guided by the associations he made between the materials and their historical and economic context.
“Plastic is this zombie medium,” he said, because it doesn’t decompose and is made from fossil fuels derived from dead organic matter. “Steel is a technology of empire that enabled weapons, the colonial project.”
Darling has exhibited works shaped by these principles in galleries in London, Paris, New York and Marseille, France. Several of his works, including an installation of chairs that slope as if on stilts, were featured in the main exhibition of the 2019 Venice Biennale.
For exhibition 2020 at Kunstverein Freiburg, in southern Germany, built a clip-on coaster whose rails end up spreading out like twisted ends. In an essay on the Artforum showDarling said this presentation in a Nazi-era swimming pool was in part an exploration of “the fascist obsession with the perfect body”.
Darling’s interest in this subject is partly biographical. In 2017, he was diagnosed with a neurological disorder that causes weakness and pain on one side of his body and reduces his capacity for art. For him, he said, “disability is not a metaphor.”
And although many news stories described him as the first trans winner of the Turner Prize, Darling deflected when asked about his relationship with the sex. “I usually tell the papers that I’m openly bisexual because it gives people something to talk about,” he said, adding, “I’ve never met anyone who is bisexual.”
Concerns about disability and gender were expressed in “The Ballad of Saint Jerome.” a 2018 show at Tate Britain which centered on the legend of a saint who tamed a lion by removing a thorn from its foot. The show featured medical devices, sex toys and other objects placed in provocative tableaus: a mobility cane twisted to look like a snake, a webbing strap dangling from a makeshift flagpole and metal arms emerging from a wall to hold a ladder which rises to the ceiling.
Sebastian Thomas, an artist in Reading, England, who has helped assemble works for several of Darling’s shows, including the Turner Prize, said the installations come together in an improvised fashion. “It’s not high production values, it’s not about this shiny luxury product,” he said. “It’s about having a big object and a direct relationship with it.”
Thomas added that he was touched when Darling sold one of the pieces they had worked on together and paid him a share of the profits. “This is a crazy thing I’ve never come across before,” he said. “He lives what he preaches.”
This also includes supporting political causes: My love was holding a Palestinian flag during his Turner Prize acceptance speech and signed an open letter protesting Israel’s participation in this year’s Venice Biennale. He too he refuses to show his work in Germany because he believes that arts organizations there are censoring opinions that criticize Israel. “Opposite views” were being punished in the art world in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, he said.
He admitted it was an awkward time to win the Turner Prize when his commitment to making art was faltering. “The problem isn’t art, it’s the state of capitalism and the market and the way this whole gig works,” he said. He added that he avoided going to his studio, which felt like he was “going on”.
This fall he will try something different when he returns to his hometown become an associate professor at the Ruskin School of Art, part of the University of Oxford. “I’m going to the citadel to see what it’s like,” he said. “What will I be now, if I am no longer marginal and precarious? I do not know man”.
He said he hoped he could learn to enjoy making art again if it was more of a “hobby” than the focus of his career – but that making such a pivot after all the Turner Prize hype was awkward. “I really wouldn’t want to always have to do my learning in public,” he said. “It’s a vulnerable moment because I don’t know what I’m going to be yet.”
