ES DEVLIN: FACE TO FACE: 50 ENCOUNTERS WITH STRANGERS is a new exhibition at Somerset House which includes an edition of CONGREGATION, the large-scale installation Devlin created in partnership with The Courtauld, King’s College and UK for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, curated by Ekow Eshun at St Mary Le Strand in October this year.
The exhibition’s first room contains a replica of the artist’s studio. The second presents a new edition of her projection-mapped Congregation installation. In the third Devlin will show a series of new works including painted LED screens and projection-mapped portraits. The exhibition is presented within the West Wing of Somerset House, directly accessible from the courtyard.
The exhibition title, FACE to FACE: 50 Encounters with Strangers, alludes to the 1969 essay ‘Totality and Infinity’ by French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, which explores the forces at work during any face to face encounter.
Over a period of four months, 50 strangers arrived, one by one, at Devlin’s studio in South London. She knew only their first name and that, at some point in their life, they sought refuge in London. She made chalk and charcoal portraits of each participant, carrying out the first 45 minutes of the drawing session without talking, and without any knowledge of her sitter/co-author’s story or circumstances. After 45 minutes the drawing was paused while the co-author told Devlin their story. She then resumed the drawing and completed the work while listening to podcasts about the conflict from which her sitter sought sanctuary.
Each portrait sitter became a co-author of the work. Each is depicted holding a gift, a box containing a projected animated sequence which they have invited Devlin to envisage. The co-authors constitute a vibrant London congregation whose roots extend across the globe to Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, Libya, Palestine, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Eritrea, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Somalia, Tanzania, Chile, Venezuela, Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo and Germany. They range in age from 18 to 93; some arrived decades ago as small children, some arrived a few years ago on small boats.
The studio in which these encounters took place will be recreated at Somerset House including all 50 original chalk and charcoal portraits in progress as well painted studies, books, notes and research materials as well as time lapse and documentary footage exploring Devlin’s process. A number of her early sketched portraits of friends, family and strangers and herself will also be included, some of which date back to the early 1990s.
In a separate room, the drawings will be presented as a projection-mapped tiered structure similar to the one shown at St Mary Le Strand church in October. Additional voices of co-authors will be added to the sound installation for this new presentation.
The sound installation, by London composer duo Polyphonia, includes poetry by the Kinshasa-born poet JJ Bola (also featured in the portraits) and extracts from Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the soundtrack to the drawing sessions. It culminates in a reworking of Anton Bruckner’s sacred motet Locus Iste (This Place) which fuses the voices of the London Bulgarian Choir, The South African Cultural Gospel Choir UK, Genesis Sixteen and The Choir of King’s College London.
The projected film sequence has been created in close collaboration with film-maker Ruth Hogben and choreographer Botis Seva and features dancer Joshua Shanny-Wynter.
Es Devlin said:
Having shown Congregation for a week at St Mary Le Strand in October, I am grateful for this opportunity to revive for two months not only the installation, but also the process that went into making it. I’m keen to share with visitors the studio where 50 face to face encounters with strangers took place that profoundly changed me. These Londoners’ stories of dignified resilience made me proud to call myself a Londoner too: a pride with a forceful undertow of grief: grief that it had taken these encounters to awaken such pride.
I was moved in 2022 by the generosity of spirit with which we, as a country and as individuals, o?ered support to those displaced by the war in Ukraine. I wanted to understand why we have not yet been drawn to show an equivalent abundance of support to those displaced in comparable circumstances from other countries including Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Eritrea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and many more. I went to UK for UNHCR to learn more about the numbers and contexts of the 117 million people currently displaced globally.
I began each portrait without knowing my sitter/co-author’s story. For the first forty- five minutes I was drawing a stranger: I was drawing not only a portrait of a stranger, but also a portrait of the assumptions I inevitably overlay: I was drawing my own perspectives and biases. I was trying to draw in order to better perceive and understand the structures of separation, the architectures of otherness that I suspect may stand between us and the porosity to others that we are capable of feeling when these structures soften.
Devlin and curator Ekow Eshun are responding also to their research into The Courtauld’s origins, established by the descendent of Huguenot refugees, and the origins of King’s College London as a Sanctuary university which continues to provide bursaries to refugees, as well as Somerset House’s location on the Strand, an ancient processional route from east to west, a foundational migratory artery of the city since AD93.
Ekow Eshun has written an introductory essay to the work which is featured in the accompanying Courtauld publication – 80% of the price of each catalogue is donated to UNHCR UK, the UN Refugee Agency.
Devlin’s approach to making the portraits is rooted in a visit to Lucian Freud’s sketchbooks in the archive of the National Portrait Gallery, and in her research within The Courtauld’s collection of 500 years of portraiture from Albrecht Dürer to Frank Auerbach.
Emma Cherniavsky, Chief Executive of UK for UNHCR, said:
We are honoured to be working with Es Devlin on this project and so grateful for her commitment and dedication to all those forced to flee their homes due to war, violence and persecution.
Congregation is an incredible opportunity for refugee co-authors to share their stories with London in a new way. We are excited to see how visitors will respond and hope the installation will inspire more support for and solidarity with refugees here and around the world.
FACE to FACE: 50 Encounters with Strangers 23rd November – Sunday 12th January 2025 Somerset House
The exhibition is presented within the West Wing of Somerset House, directly accessible from the courtyard. Free and open to the public 10am till 6pm daily
Courtauld Publications and Editions
The Courtauld has published an accompanying catalogue which is available to purchase at The Courtauld shop for £25, of which £20 will be donated to UK for UNHCR.
The Courtauld has also created a set of limited edition prints and postcards of the work in support of UNHCR.
King’s College Sanctuary Programme
In parallel to the installation, the Sanctuary Programme and The Policy Institute at King’s, will be holding public events and policy development discussions with leading researchers on asylum and migration policy. These will be presented as part of a wider season, Lost & Found: Stories of sanctuary and belonging, developed and curated by King’s Culture.
About
Artist Es Devlin (born London 1971) views an audience as a temporary society and often invites public participation in communal choral works. Her canvas ranges from public sculptures and installations at Tate Modern, V&A, Serpentine, Imperial War Museum and the Lincoln Centre, to kinetic stage designs at the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Olympic Ceremonies, Super-Bowl half-time shows, and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for large scale stadium concerts. She is the subject of a major monographic book, ‘An Atlas of Es Devlin’, described by Thames & Hudson as their most intricate and sculptural publication to date, and a retrospective exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. In 2020 she became the first female architect of the Pavilion at a World Expo, conceiving a building which used AI to co-author poetry with visitors on its 20 metre diameter facade. Her practice was the subject of the 2015 Netflix documentary series ‘Abstract: The Art of Design’. She is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, University of the Arts London and a Royal Designer for Industry at the Royal Society of Arts. She is the recipient of The London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, an Ivor Novello Award, doctorates from the Universities of Bristol and Kent and a CBE. She has just been awarded the 2025 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Ekow Eshun is a writer and curator. He is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing Britain’s foremost public art programme, and the former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Described by Vogue as “the most inspired – and inspiring – curator in Britain”, his acclaimed exhibitions include In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, for which he was awarded the Association for Art History’s Curatorial Prize 2023 and The Time Is Always Now, at the National Portrait Gallery, a major study of the Black figure and its representation in contemporary art. He is a contributor to publications including the New York Times, Financial Times and the Guardian and the author of books including Black Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell prize for its exploration of race and identity, and Africa State of Mind, nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize. His latest book, The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them, was published in September.
