British artist Es Devlin has spent more than three decades exploring what happens when people gather in a shared space. At FUTURA SEOUL, her first solo exhibition in South Korea invites visitors to walk through a film, sing together, and draw people they've just met. The exhibition is called "3rd Poem: Es Devlin, Come Home Again."
It opens with Infinite Library, where a film plays across shelves lined with upside-down books. At intervals, the shelves open, and visitors can walk through the moving image into Mirror Maze. There, mirrors repeat their reflections and change how they see the room around them.
Devlin calls an audience a "Temporary Society," a group that forms when people spend time in the same place. This is the first exhibition in the gallery's 100 Poems series to let daylight into the display space. As the day goes on, sunlight changes the rooms and the view out to the garden.
In Screenshare, hundreds of sketchbooks from 35 years of Devlin's work form a screen for a film. The books contain drawings of London's wildlife, her children, and ideas she worked on with others. The film includes footage Devlin made with dancer Dam Van Huynh in 2008. After watching it, visitors can take a sketch home. The work that gives the exhibition its name, Come Home Again, uses drawings, sound, and light to explore the wildlife of London and Seoul. It invites visitors to learn and sing the names of threatened species from the two cities. Devlin draws a parallel between the loss of species and the loss of languages.
At a shared table in Collective Portrait, visitors sit across from strangers and draw each other. The drawings stay behind, building a record of the people who have taken part. In Collective Reading, visitors can also spend time with books that shaped Devlin's work.