Jesse Darling — Les Ambassadeurs — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In about 2 months: April 3 → September 13, 2026

Jesse Darling — Prix Turner 2023 Le Prix Turner 2023 a été décerné ce 5 décembre à Jesse Darling, un poète de la matière dont les installations et sculptures rendent hommage à toutes les formes d’êtres et d’objets rejetés, relégués dans les arcanes de l’oubli pour en fabriquer une fragile et sensible comédie.

Conceived for the Palais de Tokyo, Jesse Darling’s immersive installation unfolds as a fragile landscape composed of symbols of authority stripped of their power. Altered by history, these evanescent remnants reflect the erosion of dominant narratives and question the need to renew values in a damaged world.

In a light-filled room with large windows and patterned tiled floors, a display case filled with colorful flowers occupies a central position.

Through gestures that are both simple and striking, Jesse Darling’s sculptures and installations reveal the latent narratives embedded in the objects and materials of everyday life. The artist favors industrial materials, worn objects, or elements collected on site, assembling them into unexpected compositions that hover between hybrid relics and imagined landscapes, while emphasizing their deterioration and fragility.

While these landscapes evoke decay and the remnants of a transformed past, they are not marked by fatalism. Through a deliberate disorder—understood as a dismantling of established structures—Jesse Darling proposes a quiet resistance to the norms of a productivist world, including those of the art field.

Inflected with a critical melancholy, the artist’s work draws attention to the fragility of objects and symbols, as well as to the systems of production that bring them into being. Without sentimentality, vulnerability is affirmed as an essential condition of existence, shared by human lives, constructed structures, nature, and narratives alike.