Dieser Artikel erschien zuerst in der Berlin Art Week 2025 Sonderausgabe des Freitag.
When, in Jesse Darling’s installations, crowd-control barriers drag themselves through life on spindly legs, when walking frames buckle as if they no longer have the strength to resist gravity, when flagpoles droop and the Union Jack bows faintly towards the ground with them, the the objects become living beings, sentient creatures. »Even things have their tears and mortality touches the heart,« says Aeneas in Virgil’s epic on his journey to Carthage, confronted with scenes from the Trojan War at the Temple of Jupiter.
Looking at the installations by the 1981 Oxford-born artist, it is not war which becomes immediately apparent. Yet some of these battered objects, animated by a strange humanity, can make one feel weepy. Depending on the viewer’s state of mind, the steel pipes may limp through the world like the wounded, surrender exhausted to the unbearable nature of earthly existence, or wiggle their way with cunning deviance beneath the bars of the normative.
It is hardly surprising that Darling received the prestigious Turner Prize in 2023 for one such installation, ›Enclosures, No Medals, No Ribbons‹. Darling, however, does not think too highly about honors, the market, or spectacle. He is as uninterested in communication as he is in publicity or status symbols: The Turner Prize is »just a machine for generating content for the Tate Corporation, and no one cares about it anymore; I certainly didn’t take it personally.« The artist wrote in one of his rare emails.
»Even things have their tears and mortality touches the heart,« says Aeneas in Virgil’s epic.
The art world, however, is burning with interested in Darling and his works. And so the Molitor Gallery in Schöneberg’s Kurfürstenstraße, which is now presenting Darling’s first solo exhibition in Berlin, has been nominated for the VBKI Prize (Association of Berlin Merchants and Industrialists) for Berlin galleries, which is awarded annually during Berlin Art Week.
The exhibition combines installation elements with drawing and sculpture, such as the work ›Limping Cabinet‹. Displayed in an elegant wooden vitrine, one leg replaced by the base of a crutch, three Leitz folders rest in typical marbled cloud covers. Instead of stapled paper, each binder holds a solid block of cast concrete Is it the power of bureaucracy that must be supported at all costs? Is it in its dusty inconspicuousness that the misery of the masses and the individual manifests itself? From deportation policies to the state’s regulatory demands around identity, the machinery of labour administration, surveillance states or the annihilating bureaucracy of the Nazis—these petrified German folders summon crushing associations. Yet it would be too simple to dismiss them as mere admonitory horror. As in most of Darling’s work, there is always a wink of utopia: perhaps they are also the museum cabinets of an uncertain future, in which memory itself requires support.
Even in Darling’s rarely shown color drawings, which are now on display at Molitor, the past seems omnipresent. White outlines form the words »I Tell«, floating in front of two creatures connected by penis and breast as if by an umbilical cord. A naked body becomes a tree; one of the creatures wears jacket and hat, its faun-like hooves reminiscent of high heels. The centred composition and naïve line recall teenage aesthetics. Other works on paper also foreground human-like figures whose struggles with corporeality are unmistakable.
Even in Darling’s rarely shown color drawings, which are now on display at Molitor, the past seems omnipresent. White outlines form the words »I Tell«, floating in front of two creatures connected by penis and breast as if by an umbilical cord. A naked body becomes a tree; one of the creatures wears jacket and hat, its faun-like hooves reminiscent of high heels. The centred composition and naïve line recall teenage aesthetics. Other works on paper also foreground human-like figures whose struggles with corporeality are unmistakable.
Resistance feeds in
It is difficult not to read Darling’s drawings autobiographically—though this is an interpretation he strongly dismisses. His omnipresent rejection seems deeply felt, even as it paradoxically fuels the very idea of the self-absorbed artist-genius: there is no escape from the perverse commodity logic of the market. The marketable myth only hardens, like a straitjacket, the more the artist fights against it. And so the beings in Darling’s works suffer, they live, crawl and weep, until they crumble into aggression, activism and loneliness. The sweet naivety of childhood exists only to perish against the broken materialist world of adulthood.
It is this unvarnished directness of feeling that makes Darling’s works so appealing. It elevates them beyond accusations of remixing familiar bodies of work such as those of Tatiana Trouvé, Sylvie Fleury, Isa Genzken or Robert Gober. And when Darling, in his vanitas installations, lets the most opulent flowers rot in airtight vitrines until only mouldy decay lurks behind the glass, the war in these Trojan horses of beauty becomes palpable. And with it, the shabby simultaneity of art fairs and drone strikes, honorary awards and deportation jails, biennials and shredded bodies, teenage sex work and white cube galleries, and the all-encompassing suffering of a system from which there is no escape—not even for Jesse Darling.
Jesse Darling, Galerie Molitor, 12 SEP—8 NOV 2025