Join contemporary artist and stage designer Es Devlin CBE RDI for an in conversation with writer, curator, and broadcaster Ekow Eshun in advance of the opening of FACE to FACE: 50 encounters with strangers at Somerset House on 22 November.
In this talk, Es Devlin and Ekow Eshun will explore Devlin’s latest work, Congregation —an immersive choral installation created in partnership with UK for UNHCR, the national charity partner of the United Nations Refugee Agency, at St Mary le Strand. Curated by Ekow Eshun and developed in collaboration with King’s College London, alongside The Courtauld, this large-scale piece celebrates individuals who have found new homes in London, bringing their talents and resilience with them after experiencing forced displacement from their homelands.
Biographies:
Es Devlin (b. London, 1971) views an audience as a temporary society and 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 monographic book, An Atlas of Es Devlin and a retrospective exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. In 2020 she became the first female architect of the UK 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 the Royal Society of Arts. She has been awarded 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.
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, came out in September.
