Les ambassadeurs. Jesse Darling

Through gestures that are at once 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 discarded items collected from around the exhibition venues, he assembles them into unusual compositions, hybrid relics, or fantastic landscapes, accentuating the marks of time on their physical state, between exhaustion and degradation, as if to highlight their fragility and precariousness.

His new production, conceived for the large Verrière of the Palais de Tokyo, invites visitors to enter an impressive landscape of illegible posters and advertising signs, populated by a ghostly crowd of lecterns topped with flags alternately fluttering in the wind.

Here, these symbols of power are altered, erased, rendered inaudible, as if caught in an ongoing degradation or derealisation.

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 is akin to a disarmament, which momentarily distances violence to better neutralise it.

The title of the work, in reference to a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, is an allusion to Renaissance vanitas, which allegorically represented the fragility of human life and the futility of signs of power, culture, and progress.

In the same way, these material fossils, eroded by history, tell of the weariness 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.