Jesse Darling, Nina Kintsurashvili, Fatine-Violette Sabiri

Chapter NY is pleased to present a three-person exhibition with Jesse Darling, Nina Kintsurashvili, and Fatine-Violette Sabiri. The exhibition brings together works in which ordinary images and objects function as emotionally charged archives. Be it the recent past or the past informing the present, ancient history or history unfolding in real time, these works hold memories that often appear fragmented, depleted, and altered, or partially obscured. Spanning photography, painting, and sculpture, each work carries a trace of the recorded moment as unfixed and perpetually incomplete. This sense of instability is the underlying force of Nina Kintsurashvili’s paintings, where jagged forms and thick, painterly gestures suggest fragments of landscape, ruins, or shadowed figures without fully disclosing a clear image. Growing up in post-Soviet Tbilisi, the New York-based artist’s access to art often came indirectly through second-hand books, reproductions, and obscured printed material circulating through Bukinist networks rather than through institutions or firsthand encounter. Nukriani centers around a large dark form outlined in deep blue atop a buildup of marks in pale yellows, coral, and icy blues. Earlier layers remain visible beneath the next, giving the surface the feeling of something still shifting while being viewed—a suggestion that histories are malleable, retold and reconsidered, an archeological record subject to interpretation. Fatine-Violette Sabiri’s photographs constitute an archive of everyday life and her community drawing from memories of growing up in Morocco and her current home in Montreal. These intimate images carry the language of a casual snapshot, unstaged, yet deeply intentional through personal records and a miscellany of collected objects: a clay vase made by a friend cast in magic hour light, a self-portrait taken from her cousin’s bed who had recently passed, in which her absence becomes a character in the room, or the clutter of her studio desk with small paper piles and photos pinned to the wall, sculptures in progress leaning on the floor. Sabiri’s memories, just like the spaces depicted, feel lived-in, holding a moment or person, rather than “capturing” an image. Another work consists of a handwritten love letter the artist wrote but never sent—“failed aspirations for a potential future,” in her words,—attached to a framed photograph of a worn tiled floor, a view from her childhood apartment in Casablanca, to which the artist makes pilgrimage whenever she returns home, simply to sit at the closed door. The impossibility of completely arresting time, or the feeling of a time lost, or a potential future out of reach, also figures into the work of London-based artist Jesse Darling. The artist’s multi-disciplinary practice considers how bodily subjects are initially formed and continuously reformed through sociopolitical influences, drawing on his own experience and the inherent vulnerability of being human. Here, exuberant bouquets of flowers are enclosed within a glass vitrine, as if a museological display, an intentionally literal play on nature morte in three dimensions. Left to slowly decay over time, the bright petals bend and dry out, darkening and collapsing against the glass walls of the display case, the artist encapsulates the futility of preservation by arresting ephemerality itself as a material condition. Some things simply can’t be preserved as time never stills. Jesse Darling (b. 1981, Oxford, UK) lives and works in UK. He received his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College, London, and his BA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Darling was awarded the 2023 Turner Prize for his solo exhibition Enclosures, which was on view at Towner Eastbourne, UK, from September 2023 – April 2024. Darling has also had solo exhibitions at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, NL; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; Camden Arts Centre, London; Modern Art Oxford in Oxford; the Tate Britain, London; Galerie Sultana, Paris; Triangle France, Marseille; Chapter NY, New York; and, Arcadia Missa, London. His work was included in the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, and other group exhibitions at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt; The Drawing Center, New York; Chapter NY, New York; Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Swiss Institute, New York; Neu Gallerie, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Salts, Basel; Vitrine, London; Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Rennes, FR; and Galerie Sultana, Paris; among others. Nina Kintsurashvili (b. 1992, Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. An interdisciplinary artist and painter, she earned her BFA in painting from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 2014 and her MFA in Sculpture & Intermedia from the University of Iowa in 2014 as a Fulbright Foreign Student. Kintsurashvili’s works have been exhibited at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY; Konsthall C, Stockholm, SW; Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, GE; Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, Mestia, GE; Public Space One, Iowa City, IA; Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt, AT; LC Queisser, Tbilisi, GE; Ortegay Gasset Projects, New York, NY; and Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, BE, among others. Fatine-Violette Sabiri (b. 1994, Casablanca, Morocco) holds a BFA in Studio Arts with a Minor in Film Studies from Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows at Galerie Eli Kerr, Montreal; Pangée, Montreal; Romance, Pittsburg; Afternoon Projects, Vancouver; Patel Brown, Montreal, Espace Maurice, Montreal; Joys, Toronto; Joe Project, Montreal; Le 18, Marrakesh; Jedna Dva Trì Gallery, Prague; and Soon.tw, Montreal, among others. In 2025, Sabiri received an Explore and Create grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. She was awarded the Pierre Ayot Award in 2024, and her work was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada. Her second publication, Kiss Landing, was released by Éditions VU in 2024.