Providing safe routes for asylum seekers should be the focus of the UK government if it is to stop small boat crossings, according to the artist Es Devlin, who is unveiling 50 portraits of refugees that she wants to challenge misconceptions.
Devlin, who is best known for her spectacular theatre and opera stage sets, decided to create her Congregation project in collaboration with the UN high commissioner for refugees after researching the plight of refugees across the world and of those attempting to get to Britain.
She said: “We need safe routes. We need information hubs in each of the conflict hotspots. Have an information hub so that people can understand what their options are from where they are, what the safe routes of passage are and allow them to apply for them there. That’s how you stop the small boats. It’s not by putting more and more police.”
Devlin has made her comments at a time when experts are warning that Labour’s “smash the gangs” approach to Channel crossings, which it promises will target people-smugglers, could lead to deaths rising to “devastating” highs in the run-up to Christmas.
There have been a record 43 deaths this year, and a Home Office source told the Observer there had been no talk of developing new refugee schemes or humanitarian visas within the department.
Each of the portraits in Congregation features a refugee who lives in the UK, with participants coming from countries as varied as Syria, Bosnia, Eritrea and Germany.
Some of the subjects are well known. Devlin created portraits of the Kinshasa-born author and poet JJ Bola and the artistic director behind the Little Amal puppet, Amir Nizar Zuabi, who is originally from Palestine. Others are private individuals but all of the sitters, or co-authors as Devlin calls them, have remarkable stories.
“This is not your huddled masses with bags. This is not for pity: you want to be part of this gang,” said Devlin, who drew the sitters in her home studio in south London.
There’s the Olympic boxer Ramla Ali, who is also a model, as well as another young woman, Maya Ghazal, who became a commercial airline pilot after coming to the UK from Damascus at the age of 16.
Devlin has also sat with people who have crossed the Channel, including Eid, a man from Syria who was picked up by the Turkish coastguard after the vessel he was on broke apart and several people drowned. Despite the ordeal, he made his way to the UK and crossed the Channel.
She said: “He clung to a bit of wood and the bottom half of his body froze while people died around him. You would not get back on that boat if you had any other choice.”
Devlin opted for chalk and charcoal sketches of the sitters after looking through Lucian Freud’s sketchbooks at the National Portrait Gallery archive and visiting the Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads.
The portraits will sit in the St Mary le Strand church, which is in the middle of the Strand in central London.
Congregation runs from 3-9 October, from 11am to 9pm. From 4-9 October, there will be a choral performance at 7pm outside the Courtauld, with those who listen encouraged to enter the church.
The writer and broadcaster Ekow Eshun, who has worked as curator on the show, said it was an invitation to spend time with the portraits and consider the lives of those who had come to Britain “under duress”.
“Really, what’s going on here is an invitation to audiences to come into that space and be part of an experience of stillness, of quiet, of connection. It’s the opposite of political rhetoric,” he said.
