Darryl Daley is a London-born moving image artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. His practice critically examines the intersections of Black identity, mythology, and ideology within the framework of the Black Atlantic. Rooted in an Afro-Caribbean and surrealist perspective, he investigate Black matriarchal social structures, inheritance, and genetic memory, engaging with the concept of the immaterial archive. Through film and sound, the artist documents personal and familial histories, offering a critical exploration of identity, spirituality, and cultural continuity. This multimedia approach deconstructs conventional narrative forms, employing juxtaposition and collage to foreground nuanced discourses on Blackness and the Black body as vessels of ancestral transmission.








CIRCA ART PRIZE FINALIST

2024


Selected as a finalist for the Circa Art Prize 2024, a prestigious global award celebrating innovation in digital and moving image art. Responding to the CIRCA 20:24 manifesto, ‘<<Break Free>> Time’s Arrow Flies Forever Forward,’ the prize invited artists to challenge perceptions of time and explore themes of transformation and possibility.

The 30 finalists were chosen by an independent Curators Circle featuring prominent voices from the global art community: Mohamed Almusibli (Kunsthalle Basel, Basel), Attilia Fattori Franchini (Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna), Sydney Fishman (BOFFO, New York), Sohyeon Park (Incheon International Airport Art and Culture, Incheon), and Kostas Stasinopoulos (Serpentine Galleries, London).



REVIVAL 24

2024


Revival 24 captures a liminal moment in which, through the spirit, the Black body transcends a singular notion of masculinity to break free from the constraints of linear temporality. The film reflects an alternative tangible framework, where the contemporary and the archival converge, embodying an “untethered now.” 


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2023


UNU delves into the diasporic reconfiguration of Black Atlantic memory, examining the connective threads that shape the Afro-Caribbean diasporic experience. Through the communal term “Unu”—denoting “You” in both Jamaican creole and the Igbo language—the film asserts a shared lineage, tracing the connective threads that shape Afro-Caribbean identity. Here, “Unu” emerges as a collective address that unites the voices of the artist’s grandmother and her carer, grounding ideas of arrival and departure through their recollections of migration from Jamaica to the United Kingdom.


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YOULOGY/NO GHOSTS


2023


The film explores cyclical motifs of arrival and departure through the artist’s grandmother’s migration to the United Kingdom and her posthumous return to Jamaica, creating a transcendental frame where memory and time merge. In this speculative space, the film navigates beyond the confines of mortality, reimagining a future where inherited stories resist linearity.


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