A year after winning the Turner Prize in 2023 – the first trans artist to do so – Darling told The New York Times that he wasn’t sure he still wanted to be an artist. That doubt and disquiet went back into the work: his recent, conscience-stricken Berlin show at Galerie Molitor, The Contractor, debuted wonky kinetic sculptures alongside textual and visual allusions to the problems of making art in a world on fire. It’s characteristic of Darling’s racked, influential outlook, which has spearheaded a nascent ‘crip art’ movement to evoke a loose community of the different, damaged and vulnerable via spatial orchestrations of bent crutches and walkers, Kafkaesque concrete-filled ring-binders, steel crowd barriers and hazard tape. While he has a substantial show opening at Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk next year, Darling pointedly avoids overexhibiting, focusing instead on teaching at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art, sometime music-making and occasional viral pronouncements that call out artworld bullshit. It’s a model for honesty – and living uncorruptedly with yourself – in a dishonest field.