For the last decade, the work of British artist Jesse Darling (winner of 2023 Turner Prize) explores how bodies, objects and structures are determined and altered by History and sociopolitical contexts. This newly produced work designed for the Grand Verrière, invites visitors to enter an impressive landscape of illegible posters and advertising signs, populated by a ghostly crowd of lecterns topped with flags fluttering in the wind. Here, these symbols of power are altered, erased, rendered inaudible, as if caught in a process of degradation or derealization.

Tinted with a form of critical melancholy, this work connects us with the poignant 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 disarmament, momentarily distancing violence in order to better neutralize it.

The title of the work, which references a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, alludes to Renaissance vanitas paintings, which allegorically represented the fragility of human life and the futility of symbols of power, culture and progress. Similarly, these material fossils, ravaged by history, tell of the fatigue of dominant narratives challenged by the necessary renewal of values in a damaged world. It is through useful disorder, in the literal sense of “undoing order,” that he offers resistance to the norms of a productivist world.

This exhibition benefits from the support of: Logo Fluxus Art Projects.