Es Devlin’s ‘Face to Face: 50 Encounters With Strangers’ Is a Showcase of Refugee Resilience
LONDON — Set designer Es Devlin, who has worked with brands including Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Saint Laurent, has pinned her heart to her artwork in a new showcase called “Face to Face: 50 Encounters With Strangers,” which tells the stories of 50 refugees from 28 countries.
The idea for the exhibition, which runs until Jan. 12 at Somerset House, came after Britain’s then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman said “British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast, and which party is not,” referring to the influx of illegal boats filled with refugees, asylum seekers and other immigrants.
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Out of frustration, Devlin contacted the U.K. for UNHCR for help and they showed her data saying that 73 percent of refugees are from five countries: Ukraine, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria and Venezuela.
U.K. for UNHCR and the U.N. Refugee Agency helped the artist find 50 refugees living in the U.K. to take part in the exhibition, and she drew each subject using chalk and charcoal.
Between April and August, she asked each person to arrive at her south London studio wearing a tailored suit and only sharing their first name.
“Then, after 45 minutes, they told me their life story. I then spent another two or three hours finishing the drawings and listening to podcasts about each person’s country and the conflict they were seeking sanctuary from,” said the artist during a private view of the exhibition.
“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 [openness] to others that we are capable of feeling when these structures soften,” she added.
In the drawings, each subject is holding an empty box that Devlin painted using light colors — a symbol of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel.
In parts of the exhibition, the empty boxes are filled with a moving image of the dancer Joshua Shanny-Wynter.
In another room, the 50 drawings have been cut out and turned into a tableau vivant with a voice-over of Devlin speaking about her experience of drawing the subjects. In addition, each person featured tells their story as Max Richter’s interpretation of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” plays in the background.
All of the accounts are deeply poignant.
“After a year in Calais, trying to cross to the U.K., nothing worked. We went and bought a suitcase. I put myself in the suitcase, almost suffocating. It all felt like a dream, really, but then I made it to London Victoria station,” says Ayman Alhussein, a Syrian cinematographer who has worked on “Matar” and Netflix’s “The Swimmers.”
He adds: “I had to wait three-and-a-half years to get asylum and [was] experiencing modern slavery. I was getting paid 35 pounds a day for a 12-hour shift. During that time, I had a big passion for filmmaking, so I saved for a camera…and I now work as a cinematographer. The main reason for me to become a filmmaker is that I wanted to tell stories like mine.”
Other voices in the exhibition include Natalia Yefremova, who works in the finance department of the U.K. for UNHCR; documentary filmmaker Ornella Mutoni; Hiba Noor, a trans Pakistani filmmaker, and more.
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