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Talk Art
Jesse Darling
We meet artist Jesse Darling. His multi-disciplinary practice, of sculptures, drawings and objects, considers how bodily subjects are initially formed and continuously reformed through sociopolitical influences.
Darling (b. Oxford, UK) draws on his own experience as well as the narratives of history and counter-history. He explores the inherent vulnerability of being a body, and how the inevitable mortality of living things translates to civilizations and structures. Featuring an array of free-floating consumer goods, support devices, liturgical objects, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols, JD’s work recontextualizes manmade objects to reveal their precarity. Simultaneously wounded and liberated shapes outwardly bare their frailty and need for care and healing.
Jesse Darling is an artist who writes, lives, and works. His research is concerned with the attempt to make visible the unconscious of European petro-colonial modernity through the history of technology and the production of ideology, or the objects and ideas with which we make up the world. In sculpture and installation he has taken up this enquiry using something like a materialist poetics to explore and reimagine the worldmaking values of that modernity. He is also interested in the role of spirituality as a structuring matrix for secular social life, and his practice takes seriously the idea that intuition, dreams, pathologies and folklore all have something important to tell us about the world.
If there is a formal theme that runs through his work it is the acknowledgement of fallibility and fungibility as fundamental qualities in living beings, societies and technologies, which extends to the “mortal” quality of empires and ideas as a form of precarious optimism - nothing and no-one is too big to fail. Taking vulnerability and entanglement as a fact of life lends itself to a politics and a practice of community and coalition: Darling has been part of countless community-led projects and organizations and continues to research ways of being-with as praxis. Correspondence and dialogue form an important part of his research process.
He has published many texts online and in print, including two chapbooks: VIRGINS, published by Monitor Books (2021), and SHOWGIRLS (Arcadia_Missa publishing, 2023, on the occasion of a Tate film commission for Site Visit). Selected solo exhibitions include Enclosures at Camden Arts Center (2022), No Medals No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford (2022), Gravity Road at Kunstverein Freiburg (2022), Crevé at Triangle France Astérides (2019), and The Ballad of Saint Jerome at Tate Britain (2018—2019). Darling also participated in the 58th Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2023. In 2024, Jesse Darling became Associate Professor at the Ruskin and full-time Tutorial Fellow at St Anne's College.
Follow https://bravenewwhat.org/
@ArcadiaMissa, @GalerieSultana, @GalerieMolitor and @ChapterNY
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1. Introducing Talk Art
39:25||Season 1, Ep. 1Welcome to Talk Art! Actor Russell Tovey and gallerist Robert Diament discuss how they first became friends a decade ago, plus more recent adventures at Frieze Art Fair, the Turner Prize, South London Gallery and other exhibition highlights in London, as well as Robert's gallery relocating to the seaside town of Margate, Kent.2. Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE
01:05:51||Season 1, Ep. 2Russell & Robert talk with leading artist Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE exploring 50 years of art-making. From his early 1960s work as a conceptual artist culminating in the seminal ‘An Oak Tree’ (1973) through to more recent decades as an internationally-renowned painter, sculptor and printmaker as well as his influential role as a teacher to two generations of Young British Artists at Goldsmiths.3. Pedro Pascal
01:00:02||Season 1, Ep. 3Russell & Robert talk with leading actor Pedro Pascal, star of Narcos, Game of Thrones and forthcoming Star Wars 'The Mandalorian'. They discuss his favourite artist, a classic painting on display at Museum of Modern Art that offered Pedro comfort when he moved to New York in the mid 1990s, as well as his more recent art experiences at Tate Modern and Frieze Art Fair whilst filming in London for his latest movie Wonder Woman 1984.4. Sarah Hadland and Laura Aikman
53:37||Season 1, Ep. 4We celebrate the holidays with two dear friends, the actresses Sarah Hadland and Laura Aikman (both stars of The Job Lot comedy sitcom with Russell). Topics include Olafur Eliasson’s melting ice installation highlighting climate change, Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirrored room, the paintings of LS Lowry, Beryl Cook, Picasso and Ed Ruscha. Plus we discover which guest once pole danced for Madonna! Happy Christmas everyone. We will return in Spring 2019 with a weekly season. Love Russell and Robert X5. Louisa Buck
50:02||Season 1, Ep. 5Robert & Russell chat with leading British art critic and author Louisa Buck, columnist for the Art Newspaper and a judge of the Turner Prize in 2005. They explore how the art world has evolved since the 1980s and 90s, discover which artwork Grayson Perry made as a commission to commemorate the birth of Louisa's daughter as well as revealing the best, and very worst, interviews she's conducted. Happy International Women's Day!6. Martin Creed
01:00:57||Season 1, Ep. 6Robert & Russell meet legendary artist and ‘poet of the everyday’ Martin Creed (and his dog Jimmy). Find out why this Turner Prize winner doesn’t read reviews of his own work, who his favourite comedians are and how music has informed his art. We delve deep into Creed’s creative output spanning more than 30 years. From a giant kinetic sculpture with the word MOTHERS lit up in neon, a live performance where athletes run through the Tate as fast as they can, to a more recent handmade textile work: a multicoloured neck-warmer (worn by the artist during this very interview).7. Sadie Coles
46:12||Season 1, Ep. 7Robert & Russell meet gallerist Sadie Coles, one of the world’s most respected and successful art dealers. Discover why she set up her gallery in London after managing Jeff Koons’ studio in New York in the mid 1990s; how she first discovered the work of Sarah Lucas and John Currin; the skill of representing new artists on the primary market and the importance of taking a longterm view. We discuss feminism and equality in the workplace and why it's good to be collegiate. Finally we explore childhood trips to visit Tutankhamun at the British Museum, a memorable performance by mime artist/choreographer Lindsay Kemp and a pivotal Nancy Grossman exhibition.8. Tracey Emin CBE
01:07:57||Season 1, Ep. 8Robert & Russell meet Tracey Emin CBE, one of the world’s most respected, successful and controversial artists. During an hour-long private tour of her current solo exhibition ‘A Fortnight of Tears’, we explore her mother’s recent death, grief, everlasting love, the supernatural, insomnia and abortion. Tracey reveals that nature is one of her biggest influences and how working in a small South of France studio enabled the artist to wholeheartedly and triumphantly return to painting. Learn more about her longterm connection to the work of Edvard Munch, her return to her childhood hometown of Margate and why, surprisingly, she doesn’t keep a diary. For images of all works discussed in this episode, visit our Instagram @TalkArt Please leave us a review and rating if you’ve enjoyed this episode!9. Ryan Gander OBE
56:50||Season 1, Ep. 9Russell & Robert chat to leading conceptual artist Ryan Gander OBE. We explore artist persona, designing a kitchen sink, family ties, the soul of objects and why his art has been so commercially successful in Japan. Ryan reveals how a limited edition Rolex watch transformed into an artwork, why he worked with glow-in-the-dark concrete, the importance of empathy and why we should all ‘let the world take a turn'. For images of works discussed in this episode, visit our Instagram @TalkArt. Ryan’s new BBC Four documentary ‘Me, My Selfie and I’ is available to view on iPlayer until mid April 2019. Please leave us a review and rating if you’ve enjoyed this episode!