Jesse Darling
VANITAS, 2024
Installation
Presented by Arcadia Missa, Chapter NY, Molitor, Sultana
Born in 1981 in Oxford
Lives and works in Oxford
In Jesse Darling’s VANITAS (2024), metal barriers are contorted, twisted and stretched from their original shapes. Commonly used to inhibit free movement, to Darling metal barriers symbolize division and official control. By distorting them, the artist highlights the vulnerabilities of the power structures they represent. Presented in London for Darling’s 2023 Turner Prize exhibition under the title Come On England, the installation is reinterpreted in Paris in a special presentation together with the glass cases of his seminal work Still Life (2017 – ongoing), containing flowers which gradually decay. The project critiques privatization and economic exclusion, underscoring how both power structures and natural life cycles are vulnerable to inevitable decline and change.
