Jesse Darling

Experiential and mapped, VIRGINS takes us on car rides, through hotel rooms and up close to meat viscera and enamel structures. Oscillating through binaries, concepts of innocence and experience are dragged by their creaturely haunches by ‘gathered clumps’ of characters who play, fight, bathe, fuck and browse on the burning pyre of old ideas.

‘Jesse Darling’s poems sing from the scrappy corners where life still lives. And they pray. Darling reminds us that between the beer and a cigarette there’s always a moment to genuflect on the street. There’s always a fire to stand around, too, bottoms up to the miracle.’ — Anne Boyer

Constructed in Pennsylvania in 1827, Gravity Road was a precursor to the modern roller coaster; a sloping stretch of railroad used to cart coal out of mines. With passenger rides on offer soon afterwards, the rapid descent became an attraction and the technology was appropriated for thrill rides in amusement parks.

Jesse Darling’s sculptures, drawings and installations address the fallibility, fungibility and mortality of living beings, systems of government, ideologies and technologies – nothing is too big to fail. For his exhibition at Kunstverein Freiburg in 2020, Darling created a sculpture of a dysfunctional roller coaster, broken down to a child-like scale, becoming an anti-monument to a modernity that celebrates progress, acceleration and mastery and produces violence.

Exploring the entangled history of labour, leisure, extraction and entertainment, Gravity Road: A Rollercoaster Reader was commissioned in response to Darling’s 2020 exhibition, bringing together new texts by artist and Darling-collaborator Joe Highton and writer Sabrina Tarasoff along with a correspondence between Darling and the Kunstverein’s director Heinrich Dietz.

FEATURING TEXTS BY:
Jesse Darling
Heinrich Dietz
Joe Highton
Sabrina Tarasoff

After Laughter Comes Tears, in its exhibition and book forms, brings together artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative. This publication follows the structure of the exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, with a prologue, four acts and an epilogue, which each sample excerpts from the range of theory, fiction and poetry that inspired and substantiate the themes of the exhibition. Widening the spectrum of the traditional catalogue, each artist was given a "carte blanche"—an invitation to contribute to the book on their own terms.

This performative book was conceived as a story; a story of the pains, joys, anxieties and doubts of the 2020s. It takes as a starting point, the feelings of stasis and anger that define the present stage of late capitalism, framed by the anxieties of a generation facing a climate crisis, welfare states trampled and failed by neoliberal policies and the rise of xenophobia around the globe, partly fueled by fake news spreading on- and offline. It is an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists expressing the lurid shapes of the crises that surround us and form a (never exhaustive) part of our contemporary reality.

They are Cem A., Panteha Abareshi, Monira Al Qadiri, Kate Cooper, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Jesse Darling, Stine Deja, Omer Fast, Anna Franceschini, Guan Xiao, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lukáš Hofmann, Christian Jankowski, Chris Korda, Ndayé Kouagou, Ghislaine Leung, Isaac Lythgoe, Taus Makhacheva, Diego Marcon, Jacopo Miliani, Marie Munk, Chalisée Naamani, Agnieszka Polska, PRICE, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Mika Rottenberg, Julika Rudelius, Dorian Sari, Sin Wai Kin, Shinuk Suh, Martine Syms, Mungo Thomson, Cajsa von Zeipel, and Artur Żmijewski.

Edited by Clarisse Fahrtmann, Clementine Proby, Joel Valabrega.
Foreword by Bettina Steinbrügge.

Contributions by Kate Cooper, Lukas Hofmann, David McDermott, Markus Pilgram, Agnieszka Polska, Clémentine Proby, Sin Wai Kin, Bettina Steinbrügge, Geraldine Tedder, Joel Valabrega, Lauren Wetmore.

In a world with too many choices and too little time to explore, play is an excellent strategy. Objects, roles, bodies, settings – anything can be transformed in play. Playing across time, space, architecture, beds, houses, lives, papers. Suddenly a chair is a plane is a stroy is an animal is an avatar is a new reality. Making up worlds, filming them. Surfing warm and cold waves. Playing with identities. Playing en masse. Playing to be free.

A digital conversation with performance artist boychild, writer Chris Kraus on beer brewing and BDSM, music producer and artist Fatima Al Qadiri on her 1989 haircut, Californian surfers by Eve Fowler & Mariah Garnett, curator Annick Kleizen recapturing the artist residency circuit from a hammock in Brazil, artist Jesse Darling paraphrasing Drake, musicians The Knife dissecting their communal experiment ‘Shaking The Habitual’ through the eyes of their collaborators.

Featuring Boychild, Chris Kraus, Wu Tsang, Jesse Darling, Fatima Al Qadiri, Jam Rostron, Marit Östberg, Hanne Lippard, Kapwani Kiwange, Maroussia Rebecq, Kenji Minogue, Mariah Garnett, Eve Fowler, Lily van der Stokker, Rachel de Joode, Mademoiselle Yulia, Katja Mater, Sarah Forbes Keough, Annick Klezine, Emily Roysdon, Analisa Teachwroth, Jess Arndt, Martin Falck, Laura Davis, Mandy Pernell, Amy Sillman and Jesper Strombäch Eklund.

Ce catalogue qui accompagne l’exposition Exposé·es ne se divise pas en chapitres, mais entrelace les genres et les modalités d’écriture et de documentation, avec des formats variés. Il comprend notamment une multitude de courts entretiens ou écrits autour des pratiques des artistes et de personnes concernées, des essais commandés à des auteur·rices et des séquences d’images, représentant les travaux des artistes de l’exposition, ou documentant des projets artistiques qui ont eu lieu historiquement dans le contexte de ces luttes.

Avec les artistes : Les Ami·es du Patchwork des noms, Bambanani Women’s Group, Bastille, yann beauvais, Black Audio Film Collective, Gregg Bordowitz, Jesse Darling, Moyra Davey, Guillaume Dustan, fierce pussy (Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, Carrie Yamaoka), Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Hervé Guibert, Barbara Hammer, Derek Jarman, Michel Journiac, Zoe Leonard, audrey liebot, Pascal Lièvre, Santu Mofokeng, Jean-Luc Moulène, Henrik Olesen, Bruno Pélassy, Benoît Piéron, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Jimmy Robert, Régis Samba-Kounzi & Julien Devemy, Marion Scemama, Lionel Soukaz & Stéphane Gérard, Georges Tony Stoll, Philippe Thomas, David Wojnarowicz

Et les auteur·ices : Clémence Allezard, Cécile Chartrain, Vinciane Despret, Mylène Ferrand, Amandine Gay, Philippe Joanny, Elisabeth Lebovici, Nicolas Linnert, Sylvère Lotringer, Tim Madesclaire, Helen Molesworth, Veronica Noseda, Peggy Pierrot, François Piron, Donald Rodney, Jane Solomon, Jo-ey Tang, Gaëtan Thomas

Design graphique : Roxanne Maillet

The Ignota Diary is a tool for discovery in the practice of everyday life. This beautifully designed diary and week-to-view planner is filled with historically significant magical and sacred dates from around the world. Drawn from events such as the Buddha’s birthday, esoteric festivals and artistic and occult history, the diary touches on the lives of characters such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Jung, Simone Weil, Aleister Crowley, George Bataille, Timothy Leary, Hilma af Klint, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, William Blake and W.B. Yeats. 

The diary provides full astrological navigation for 2020 with an overview of the year, a birthchart template and guides to moon magic, houses, planets and symbols. Key transits, retrogrades and lunar phases, noted throughout the planner, allow you to organise your life in alignment with the astrological weather, visible at a glance. A global map showing sacred sites provides inspiration for transformative pilgrimages. 

Rituals by the acclaimed artist Jesse Darling and poets CAConrad, Bhanu Kapil and Nisha Ramayya and seasonal tarot spreads by practitioners including adrienne maree brown and Rachel Pollack, author of the bestselling tarot guide 78 Degrees of Wisdom, offer guidance and space for reflection throughout the year. Additional sources of inspiration include guides to Soji cleaning by Zen monk Shoukei Matsumoto, author of the bestseller A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind, and guided meditation by Julian Vayne of the Psychedelic Museum. 

To support a holistic approach to health and wellbeing, an appendix contains guides to healing herbs, key acupressure points, the chakra system and Ayurvedic medicine, as well as a directory of key magical places, shops and websites

With the fourth issue of How to Sleep Faster we asked our contributors four interconnected questions: What now is a radicalised, networked, subjectivity? How can we build a commons through and from this subjectivity? Is it self-critical in its understanding of the ‘we’ it talks for? And lastly, how do, and how must, these subjectivities engage with globalised material realities?

At root, the exploration of these ideas — as connected themselves – is about a critique of readings of the network through Multitude. We are looking to think beyond immanence, and look to something else, by asking what ‘something else’ is, or could be.

Contributors: Megan Kelly Rooney, Eleanor Weber, William Kherbek, Hannah Black, Harry Sanderson, Georgina Miller, Paul Kneale, Candice Jacobs, Aimee Heinemann, Ann Hirsch, Harry Burke, Rosa Aiello, John Bloomfield, Maja Malou Lyse (Boothbitch), Holly White, Martina Miholic, Felix Petty, Huw Lemmey, Julian Molina, Rachel Schofield Owen, Charlie Woolley, Jesse Darling, KERNEL.

Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark (eds).