Es Devlin’s new work supporting UNHCR features portraits of 50 Londoners affected by displacement

Known best for her theatre and opera sets, artist Es Devlin is taking the historic St Mary le Strand Church as her next ‘stage’, creating a monumental installation in partnership with the UK for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency.

Curated by Ekow Eshun, and developed in collaboration with King’s College London in partnership with The Courtauld, Congregation is a mammoth collective portrait installation, brought further to life by sound and animation.

Devlin has been working for months on large-scale chalk and charcoal portraits of 50 Londoners who have experienced forced displacement from their homelands – spanning the globe from Palestine and Ukraine to Venezuela and Chile. These will be presented in a tiered structure, with each subject (and co-author, for their input to the work) depicted holding a box containing a projected animated sequence of specific, beloved objects chosen by them.

The visual elements of the work will be further animated by an accompanying sound sequence, composed by Polyphonia and featuring all 50 voices, and choral performances outside the church at dusk each evening.

In parallel with the installation, the Sanctuary Programme and The Policy Institute at King’s are hosting public events and policy development discussions with leading researchers on asylum and migration policy. These will be presented as part of the wider ‘Lost & Found: Stories of sanctuary and belonging’ season, developed and curated by King’s Culture.

Devlin says she was “moved by the generosity of spirit with which we, as a country and as individuals, offered support to those displaced by the war in Ukraine,” but was struck by the lack of “an equivalent abundance of support to those displaced in comparable circumstances from other countries”. A desire to understand this imbalance drew her to UK for UNHCR to “learn more about the numbers and contexts of the 117 million people currently displaced globally, and the experiences of refugees now living in the UK”.

“I am beginning each portrait without knowing my sitter/co-author’s story. For the first forty-five minutes I am drawing a stranger: I am drawing not only a portrait of a stranger, but also a portrait of the assumptions I inevitably overlay: I am drawing my own perspectives and biases,” Devlin describes the process of creating the work. “I am 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.”

“Congregation is an incredible opportunity for refugee co-authors to share their stories with London in a new way,” Emma Cherniavsky, Chief Executive of UK for UNHCR, said.  “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.”

Congregation will be on show at  St Mary le Strand in London from 3-9 October 2024.