Es Devlin’s large-scale choral installation celebrates London’s displaced population

Es Devlin’s large-scale choral installation, Congregation, opening in London tonight (3 October 2024), considers themes of displacement, personal bias and separation in an immersive celebration of the power of acoustemology (sound as a way of knowing). Devlin, who for the project has teamed with UK for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency’s national charity partner, will be showcasing 50 portraits of Londoners who have been forcibly displaced from their home. The free and open-to-all exhibition at 18th-century church St Mary le Strand, curated by Wallpaper* contributing editor Ekow Eshun, is accompanied by choral music performed each evening outside the church.

For Devlin, who invited the subjects of her chalk and charcoal portraits to her home for their sittings, the experience was an emotional one.

‘The doorbell would ring, and I would know the first name of the person and that was it,’ says Devlin. ‘But I purposely did not know anything else. They knew the set-up – they walked in, had a cup of tea, sat down, and I immediately put the music on [Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons]. I said, “We're not going to talk yet, but I do want you to look straight into my eyes. And if it's uncomfortable, then when I'm not looking at you, look around the room, but whenever I'm looking in your eyes, please look back at me”, which is an odd thing to do for 45 minutes.’

After the time was up, Devlin paused the music to conduct an interview, with the sitter sharing their story and revealing how they came to be in London, whether it was decades ago, as a child, or weeks ago on a small boat. The drawing then resumed while the conversation continued, with Devlin taking photos before the sitter left to enable her to complete the work alone.

‘By the time we got to that moment of telling the story, there was a real sense of relief. They were relieved to tell me who they were. I would feel really anxious about doing them justice and getting them right.’

After studying the person’s appearance for 45 minutes, Devlin was forced to confront her unconscious bias and assumptions about who they were upon hearing their story. ‘The picture would sit there while we did the interview, just accusing me. With Maya [Ghazal], I had never drawn a woman in a hijab before, and I got really involved in this beautiful woman, how the hijab went exactly there, how the light came through. Of course, we did the interview and she said, “Right, I'm a commercial pilot. I fly 737s.” And I just felt like such an idiot. What was I doing, faffing about with her hijab when I should be on her pilot's black, chunky watch? If I'd known she was a pilot, I would have gone on about the watch. But you don't have access to this information, so you go to what your associations are, and that's what I really wanted to draw attention to myself. I thought if it's in me, it'll be in everyone.’

In the drawings, subjects are pictured holding a box that contains a projected animated sequence that they have created. Devlin views the resulting works as co-authored, the result of a dialogue between herself and the participant that subverts a mainstream narrative. By each sitter being viewed through a shared lens, the external and objectifying gaze is eschewed, giving a face and a voice to the persecuted and the voiceless.

In choosing to create these images in haunting charcoal and chalk, Devlin draws on an emotive canon of portraiture inspired by Lucien Freud’s sketchbooks, as well as Frank Auerbach’s charcoal portraits, which were on show at the Courtauld earlier in the year. She views Congregation, with its sole focus on the inhabitants of London, as a sister work to 2022’s Come Home Again, in which she presented drawings of London’s wildlife. ‘This piece is not about all the world's refugees,’ Devlin adds. ‘This piece is really about London. I think that the best way into the general and the universe is to be very particular, so in this case, it is about a very specific community. And what I would say about this community that came in and out of my doors here is, this is us. This is London.’

Es Devlin will unveil Congregation, a new large-scale choral installation she has created in partnership with UK for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency’s national charity partner, at St Mary le Strand from 3 – 9 October 2024. The work, has been developed in collaboration with King’s College London in partnership with The Courtauld.

The work will be free and open to the public daily from 10am till 6pm, with free public choral performances within the surrounding pedestrianised area of The Strand outside The Courtauld at 7pm each evening, from Thursday 3 October until Wednesday 9 October, to coincide with Frieze London 2024

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