On Es Devlin and Ekow Eshun's Congregation
Wednesday, October 9, 2024 at 12:18PM Last night caught Es Devlin’s Congregation installation, curated by Ekow Eshun, and the related talk with them both, Entanglement. If you’re in London, today’s the last day to see Congregation at St. Mary le Strand church. It’s worth a look – but be prepared to have mixed feelings.
On the one hand Congregation is making it possible for its refugee 'co-authors' to be seen and heard. And – as with Herndon & Dryhurst’s The Call at the Serpentine – choirs are used to help further convey the collectivity of the portrait.
On the other, the whole thing rests on the telling of the biographical stories of individuals, with Britain and London especially too often being cast as the saviour in the narrative.
Who is Congregation for really? In Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad writes that the most we can hope for from novels is ‘not revelation, the dawning of knowledge, but the exposure of its limit. To realise you have been wrong about something'. Congregation may have the potential to challenge the ‘stop the boats’ crowd in this respect. But do conservatives and right-wingers really constitute the main audience for such a piece? Are most of those left-liberals who are likely to make the effort to see it not already aware of these issues? Nevertheless – and to borrow once more from Hammad – it feels like pressure is being placed on those who have experienced forced displacement to yet again ‘tell the human story that will educate and enlighten others and so allow for the conversion of the repentant Westerner, who might then descend onto the stage if not as hero than perhaps as some kind of deux ex machina.’
As for Entanglement, held at King’s College London, it was disappointing. Devlin and Eshun are prominent cultural movers and shakers. So it was surprising – and rather sad – to encounter such a lack of intellectual curiosity on their part. By now there has been decades of work on the ethics of hospitality and on recognising the stranger, of which Hammad’s is only a recent literary example. But apart from a cursary – and somewhat confused – mention of Levinas (which consisted in the main of the retelling of his biography as a displaced person himself!?), none of it was referenced here, let alone built upon or engaged with. Why is English culture so anti-intellectual? All in all, very much a missed opportunity.