There is something almost perversely fitting about the fact that Amsterdam’s oldest building, a church that has spent centuries being repurposed, from Catholic mass to Protestant worship, from stock exchange to cemetery to concert hall to art venue, is now home to an installation built entirely from things the city has thrown away.
Jesse Darling’s Godsworth opened at the Oude Kerk on April 24th and runs until September 27th. It is the British artist’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, and if you have not been yet, here is what you are walking into.
The floor of the church is largely covered in construction rubble. Rising from it are sculptures assembled from discarded furniture, scrap metal, and broken appliances, materials that Darling collected from Amsterdam himself, some of it gathered during the time he spent as part of the city’s squatters’ movement. Scaffolding elements run through the compositions, offering structure while also making clear that everything here is still, in some sense, under construction. It looks like the city ate itself and someone decided to make something out of the wreckage. Which is, more or less, exactly what happened.
Darling, who won the Turner Prize in 2023 and is widely considered one of the most influential artists working today, is not interested in ruin for its own sake. The rubble is not an endpoint, he has said, but matter in transition, something awaiting revaluation and a new meaning. It is a framework that sits comfortably inside a building that has spent six centuries being exactly that: matter in transition, meaning being made and remade depending on who is doing the gathering and why.
The installation draws on the nearly 40 altars that once stood throughout the church, each one a place of ritual and gathering for a different group of people with their own interconnections and ways of making sense of things. In Godsworth, those meeting points return, reconfigured from salvaged materials into something that could shift form at any moment. Provisional by design. Which is, if you sit with it for a second, an honest description of most of the structures we build, physical, social, political, and choose to call permanent.
In a moment when social, ecological, and political systems are visibly under pressure, Godsworth does not offer answers so much as it insists on the question: what is actually valuable, who decides, and what happens when we are forced to reconsider.
Parallel to the exhibition, the Oude Kerk is running a public programme throughout the summer. Weekly drop-in tours, concerts, artist and student talks, workshops. The final weekend will feature an Evening Service organised by Darling himself, including a performance by his band Gentle Strangers.
