Es Devlin is to open her first solo exhibition in Korea at FUTURA SEOUL this month, bringing together more than 30 years of a practice spanning visual art, performance, architecture, literature and technology.
Opening on 20th August 2026, 3rd Poem: Es Devlin, Come Home Again has been newly conceived and configured for FUTURA SEOUL, taking visitors through a sequence of installations including Infinite Library, Mirror Maze, Line of Light, Screenshare and Come Home Again.
The exhibition centres on an idea that has run through Devlin’s work for more than three decades: presence — not simply being physically present, but becoming conscious of other people, other voices and other forms of life sharing the same space.
It is familiar territory for an artist who has spent much of her career thinking about what happens when people gather together.
Devlin began in opera and theatre at the Royal Opera House before creating stage environments for artists including Beyoncé, U2, Adele, Kendrick Lamar and The Weeknd, alongside projects for the London 2012 Olympic closing ceremony and the 2022 Super Bowl Halftime Show. Since 2016, she has increasingly transferred the spatial language of performance into museums and public spaces, treating an audience as what she calls a “Temporary Society.”
In Seoul, that thinking begins with books.
Infinite Library takes the form of a small library, with Devlin’s drawings and moving images projected across shelves of upside-down books. The bookshelf then opens, allowing visitors to physically pass through the projected image and enter Mirror Maze, an environment constructed entirely from mirrors.
The latter draws on contemporary eco-philosophical ideas around the “hall of mirrors” — the feedback loop of human signs and symbols that can both obscure and reveal our relationship with the wider biosphere.
Natural light also becomes part of the exhibition.
Unlike FUTURA SEOUL’s previous two exhibitions, which centred on darkened spaces, Devlin’s presentation actively embraces daylight, allowing the building’s curves and geometric structure to become part of the work. The artist describes this relationship between architecture, natural light and her installations as a “language of light.”
Line of Light, positioned in a space opening onto the garden, originated in a moment when Devlin woke in an unfamiliar room and could initially perceive only a single line of light. In Seoul, artificial light inside the gallery and daylight beyond its windows are brought together as one landscape.
Upstairs, Screenshare turns hundreds of sketchbooks accumulated over more than 30 years into a single large screen. Drawings, notes and traces of Devlin’s collaborations appear as moving images across its surface. When the film ends, visitors can remove one of the sketches and take it home, gradually dismantling the screen while dispersing fragments of the artist’s archive into the city.
The work includes drawings of London’s wildlife and Devlin’s children alongside the working sketches left behind while developing ideas with collaborators. Footage made with dancer Dam Van Huynh in 2008 also places the performer alongside an image of herself 18 years younger.
Another work crosses directly between London and Seoul.
Come Home Again brings together drawings, voices and choral recordings of species encountered in both cities, asking visitors to learn and sing the names of threatened beings. The work connects biodiversity with the disappearance of human languages, imagining the city as a shared network of species and cultures rather than an exclusively human environment.
Participation continues with Collective Portrait. Visitors sit opposite strangers at a large communal table and draw one another, leaving their portraits behind. As more people pass through the exhibition, the accumulation of these encounters becomes the work.
The exhibition is the third chapter in FUTURA SEOUL’s ongoing 100 POEMS programme, which treats each exhibition as a “poem” and its artist as the poet. It follows Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive and Anthony McCall’s Works 1972–2020. Where those exhibitions explored data, machines, light and the body, Devlin’s third “poem” turns towards the mirror — looking at ourselves while searching for the other within.
Es Devlin: 3rd Poem: Come Home Again,
20th August 2026–17th January 2027,
FUTURA SEOUL
Coinciding with the exhibition, Devlin’s new publication A Concise Atlas of Es Devlin will also receive its Korean preview. The 942-page publication includes around 1,000 colour images and conversations with collaborators including Pharrell Williams, Bono, Brian Eno and Carlo Rovelli.
