ES DEVLIN: FACE TO FACE: 50 ENCOUNTERS WITH STRANGERS is a new exhibition at Somerset House which includes an edition of CONGREGATIONthe large-scale installation created by Devlin in partnership with The Courtauld, King’s College and the UK for UNHCR, United Nations Refugee Agencycurated by Ekow Eshun at St Mary Le Strand in October this year.

The first room of the exhibition contains a replica of the artist’s studio. The second features a new projection-mapped edition of it Congregation installation. In the third, Devlin will present a series of new works, including painted LED screens and projected portraits. The exhibition is presented in the West Wing of Somerset House, accessible directly from the courtyard.

The title of the exhibition, FACE TO FACE: 50 meetings with strangersalludes to the 1969 essay “Totality and Infinity” by the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinaswhich 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 only knew their first names and that at some point in their lives they had sought refuge in London. She made chalk and charcoal portraits of each participant, conducting the first 45 minutes of the drawing session without speaking and without any knowledge of her co-author’s story or circumstances. After 45 minutes, the drawing was interrupted 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 boss sought refuge.

Each portraitist became a co-author of the work. Each is depicted holding a gift, a box containing a projected animated sequence that they invited Devlin to envision. The co-authors are 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, Democratic Party. Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Somalia, Tanzania, Chile, Venezuela, Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo and Germany. They are aged between 18 and 93; some arrived decades ago as small children, others arrived a few years ago on small boats.

The studio where these meetings took place will be recreated at Somerset House, including all 50 original chalk and charcoal portraits in progress, as well as well-painted studies, books, notes and research materials, as well as period images and documentaries exploring Devlin’s trial. Also included will be some of her early sketch portraits of friends, family and strangers, and of herself, some dating back to the early 1990s.

In a separate room, the designs will be displayed as a map-designed tiered structure similar to the one displayed at St Mary Le Strand church in October. Additional voices of the co-authors will be added to the sound installation for this new presentation.

The sound installation, by the London composer duo Polyphonyincludes poetry by the Kinshasa-born poet JJ Bola (also shown in 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 combines the voices of the London Bulgarian Choir, South African Cultural Gospel Choir, Genesis Sixteen and the King’s College London Choir.

The projected film sequence was created in close collaboration with the director Ruth Hogben and choreographer Botis Seva and features dancer Joshua Shanny-Wynter.

Es Devlin said:

After what it looked like Congregation for a week at St Mary Le Strand in October, I am grateful for this opportunity to relive for two months not only the installation but also the process that went into making it. I am eager to share with visitors the studio where 50 face-to-face encounters with strangers took place that profoundly changed me. The stories of these Londoners of worthy resistance made me proud to call myself a Londoner: a pride with a strong overflow of pain: pain that it took these meetings to awaken such pride.

I was moved in 2022 by the generosity of spirit with which we, as a country and as individuals, offered 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 in other countries, including Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and many others . . I went to the UK for UNHCR to learn more about the numbers and contexts of the 117 million people currently displaced globally.

I started each portrait without knowing the story of my co-author. In the first forty-five minutes I drew a stranger: I drew not just a portrait of a stranger, but a portrait of the assumptions I inevitably overlay: I was drawing my own perspectives and biases. I was trying to draw to better perceive and understand the structures of separation, the architectures of otherness that I suspect might stand between us, and the porosity to others that we are able to feel when these structures soften.

Devlin and curator Ekow Eshun they also answer their research into the origins of The Courtauld, established by descendants of Huguenot refugees, and the origins of King’s College London as a Sanctuary university that continues to offer scholarships to refugees, as well as the location of Somerset House on the Strand, an ancient east-west processional route , a fundamental migratory artery of the city since 93 AD.

Ekow Eshun wrote an introductory essay to the work, which is featured in the accompanying Courtauld publication – 80% of the price of each catalog 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 archives of the National Portrait Gallery and her research within The Courtauld’s 500-year collection of portraits from Albrecht Dürer to Frank Auerbach .

Emma Cherniavsky, UK Executive Director of UNHCR, said:

We are honored to work with Es Devlin on this project and are so grateful for her commitment and dedication to all those forced from their homes by 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 and solidarity with refugees here and around the world.

FACE TO FACE: 50 meetings with strangers November 23 – Sunday January 12, 2025 Somerset House

The exhibition is presented in the West Wing of Somerset House, accessible directly from the courtyard. Free and open to the public daily from 10am to 6pm

Courtauld Publications and Editions

The Courtauld has published an accompanying catalog which can be purchased from The Courtauld shop for £25, of which £20 will be donated to the UK for UNHCR.

Courtauld has also created a set of limited edition prints and postcards of the work in aid of UNHCR.

King’s College Sanctuary Programme

Alongside the installation, the Sanctuary Program and Institute of Policy at King’s will hold public events and policy development discussions with leading researchers in asylum and migration policy. These will be presented as part of a larger season, Lost & Found: Stories of sanctuary and belonging, developed and organized by King’s Culture.

About

Artist It’s Devlin (born London 1971) sees the public as a temporary society and often invites public participation in community choral works. Her canvas ranges from public sculptures and installations at the Tate Modern, V&A, Serpentine, Imperial War Museum and Lincoln Center, to kinetic stage at the Royal Opera House, National Theater and Metropolitan Opera, as well as Olympic ceremonies, Super- Shows at half-time bowls and monumental stage sculptures lit 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, designing a building that used artificial intelligence to create poetry with visitors on its 20-meter-diameter facade. Her practice was the subject of the 2015 Netflix documentary series Abstract: The Art of Design. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, University of the Arts London and Royal Industrial Designer at the Royal Society of Arts. She has received the London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, an Ivor Novello Award, PhDs from the Universities of Bristol and Kent and a CBE. He just received the 2025 Eugene McDermott Award for the Arts at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Ekow Eshun is a writer and curator. He is chairman of The Fourth Plinth, which oversees the UK’s leading public art programme, and former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Described by Vogue as “Britain’s most inspiring – and inspiring – curator”, his acclaimed exhibitions include In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, for which he received the Art History Association’s 2023 Curatorial Award, and The Time Is Always Now , at the National Portrait Gallery, a major survey of the black figure and its representation in contemporary art. He is a contributor to publications such as the New York Times, Financial Times and The Guardian, and author of books such as Black Gold of the Sun, an Orwell Prize-nominated exploration of race and identity, and Africa State of Mind, a Lucie Photo Book Award-nominee. His latest book, The Outsiders: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Themwas published in September.

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