Evening Service at Godsworth
19 September 2026
8:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.
Evening programme accompanying artist Jesse Darling’s exhibition Godsworth.
During the final week of his exhibition Godsworth, artist Jesse Darling will curate an Evening Service in which he will explore themes from the exhibition together with performers, musicians, scientists and other guests. The event takes the form of a contemporary church service and examines the forms of community and gathering that emerge at a time when social, political and ecological systems are under pressure. What connects us when familiar structures begin to falter?
Programme
With contributions from, among others: Jesse Darling & Friends, Klaas Touwen (former minister of the Oude Kerk congregation), and Marianna van der Zwaag (curator of Godsworth).
Darling: 'This exhibition is for the believers, for people without faith, for people who are interested in the church, for people who do not feel at ease in the church, for the people who made it with me, and for people I do not yet know. A church is built as a place for the divine, as a vast field, an energetic field in which things and histories come together. I did not want to interrupt that. I wanted to add something to it.'
About Godsworth
With his installation Godsworth, Jesse Darling has transformed the church space into a landscape made from rubble and construction waste, highlighting the history of the church as a place of gathering. Scattered throughout the landscape are sculptures assembled from discarded furniture, scrap metal and broken appliances. For this work, Darling was inspired by the nearly forty altars that once stood throughout the church. Around these altars, different groups of people gathered, each with their own rituals and networks of connection. In Godsworth, these sites of encounter and meaning-making return. Darling’s work presents a world that is unstable, vulnerable, shifting and unfinished, and asks what connects people when familiar structures begin to falter — and how what has been discarded can regain value.
