Les ambassadeurs. Jesse Darling

Palais de Tokyo

Through gestures both simple, minimal and spectacular, the sculptures and installations of Jesse Darling (winner of the Turner Prize in 2023) reveal the clandestine narratives that haunt the objects, materials, and forms that populate our daily lives. Working primarily with industrial materials, used objects or refuse collected around the venues where he exhibits, he assembles them into unusual compositions, hybrid relics or fantastical landscapes, accentuating the marks of time on their physical state, between exhaustion and degradation, as if to underline their fragility and precariousness. His new production, conceived for the great Verrière of the Palais de Tokyo, invites visitors to enter an impressive landscape of posters and advertising signs rendered illegible, populated by a ghostly crowd of speech podiums topped with flags fluttering alternately in the wind. Here, these symbols of power are altered, erased, made inaudible, as if caught in an ongoing degradation or derealization. Tinged with a form of critical melancholy, this work connects us with the moving precariousness of the materialities that surround us, but also that of the systems of production, consumption and domination that made them possible. This poetic recycling of reality resembles a disarmament, which momentarily distances violence in order to better neutralize it. The title of the work, referencing a painting by Hans Holbein le Jeune, is an allusion to Renaissance vanitas paintings, which allegorically depicted the fragility of human life and the vanity of the signs of power, culture and progress. In the same way, these material fossils, eaten away by History, tell of the fatigue of dominant narratives challenged by the necessary renewal of values in a damaged world. It is through a useful disorder, in the literal sense of 'undoing an order', that he proposes a resistance to the norms of a productivist world.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗