Darren Tesar’s activity—visual, curatorial and textual—can be understood as simply as a prolonged proximity maintained between entities, materials and/or processes. Prolonged proximities that produce a kind of pidgin—a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. The result is a production and maintenance of signs that are doubly non-native, meaning the author and object/subject are both made into partial objects.
This notion of partial plays off all three of its possible meanings, namely having a particular liking or fondness for something or someone, that, by nature of its sentimentality (a form of bias or prejudice), relates to being or affectation only in part, not total; incomplete.
Notable activities include: phantoms (1996), MnArtists, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2024; CLING RING, MirrorLab, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2022; _storation of limbs, MnArtists, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2021; NCAF Development Grant, Taipei, Taiwan, 2020; Yoke Anima, Seohak Gallery, Jeonju, South Korea, 2019; Curator: unsupportive, N/A Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, 2019: VAF Fund, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2018; Guest Curator (with Wen Li Chen): he’ (FOGSTAND Gallery) Taiwan Academy, New York, NY, USA 2018; Rough Sleeper, Sadie Halie Projects, Minneapolis, MN, USA 2018; bar-mouthing, Sadie Halie Projects, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2106; bar-mouthing, (Exhibition text, They Rephrased the Question for Another Answer: Chun Kaifeng), Fost Gallery, Singapore, 2016; fromming (Exhibition text for Death is the mother of beauty: Charles Matson Lume), New York Mills Regional Cultural Center, New York Mills, MN, 2015; Refining Commitment, Serpentine Magazine, USA & DE, 2015; Guest Curator: Absolving the Object: Kaifeng Chun, Richard Frater, Song-yun Kim, Latent Spaces, Singapore, 2015; Time after Time, Market Gallery, Glasgow, UK, 2014; Nameless Forms, Latent Spaces, Singapore, 2014; Refining Commitment, XMS Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, 2013; Reverential, published for the exhibition, Della Liquidezza Della Terra, Milan, Italy, 2013; Resident Artist at Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon, Seoul, South Korea 2013