Jesse Darling

Myths of the new future Taysir Batniji, Dora Budor, Jesse Darling, Agnieszka Kurant, P. Staff The Common Guild, Glasgow, UK 17 May 2025 — 19 July 2025

‘Myths of the new future’ is an exhibition that brings together the work of five artists who, in varying and distinct ways, address psychosocial tensions in present-day urban life. Identifying a particularly anxious, unstable, and incoherent texture to our late-capitalist period, ‘Myths of the new future’ circulates around the question of how it feels to be alive now, through experimental and conceptual works in sculpture, video, drawing, poetry and photography. The artists involved offer propositions that explore affective states, emotional intensities and the unsettling character of our urban social sphere today.

With an awareness of the forces that shape our psychic experience, artists point towards a host of mental aggressors that fuel nervous states: ecological crises and war; volatile sociopolitical contexts and faltering neoliberal democracies; competing digital hegemonies and the bewildering immediacy of the ‘technopresent’. Artists make visible their feelings of estrangement within this continuum, and by doing so, call into question normative ways of living and being. Exposing the deepening cracks appearing across society, their work demonstrates the precariousness of the constructed urban world whilst opening up space for the emergence of other possible trajectories and innumerable futures.

Image Credits: Dora Budor, Jesse Darling, Myths of the new future, The Common Guild, 2025, installation view. Photo: Ruth Clark.