Les Ambassadeurs - Jesse Darling

Through gestures that are at once simple, minimal and spectacular, Jesse Darling’s sculptures and installations (Turner Prize winner, 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 scraps collected around the sites where they exhibit, they assemble them into unusual compositions, hybrid relics or fantastical landscapes, accentuating the marks of time on their physical condition—between exhaustion and decay—as if to underline their fragility and precarity.

Their new production, conceived for the large Verrière of the Palais de Tokyo and on view from 3 April 2026 at 10:00, invites visitors to enter an impressive landscape of posters and advertising signs rendered unreadable, peopled by a ghostly crowd of lecterns for speeches topped with flags alternatingly fluttering in the wind. Here, these symbols of power are altered, erased, made inaudible, as if seized in an ongoing process of degradation or derealization.

Tinted with a kind of critical melancholy, this work connects us to the poignant precariousness of the materialities that surround us, but also to that of the systems of production, consumption and domination that made them possible. This poetic recycling of the real resembles a disarmament that momentarily puts violence at a distance in order to better neutralize it.

The title of the work, referring to a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, alludes to Renaissance vanitas, which allegorically represented the fragility of human life and the vanity of signs of power, culture and progress. In the same way, these material fossils, corroded 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—literally, “undoing an order”—that the artist proposes resistance to the norms of a productivity-driven world.