Es Devlin Builds a Temporary Society in FUTURA SEOUL
Brining together three decades of immersive work exploring presence, participation and the spaces we share.
Summary
'3rd Poem' marks Es Devlin’s first solo exhibition in Korea.
The show spans more than 30 years of work across light, sound, drawing, architecture and moving image.
Visitors are folded into the exhibition through participatory works that explore presence, memory and collective experience.
Es Devlin has spent much of her career thinking about what happens when people enter a space together. Her stages and installations have surrounded audiences with light, sound and architecture, often blurring the line between spectator and participant. For her first solo exhibition in Korea, that relationship between people, place and attention takes center stage.
Titled 3rd Poem: Es Devlin, Come Home Again,the exhibition takes over FUTURA SEOUL in Bukchon through January 17, 2027. Spanning more than 30 years of Devlin’s practice, the show brings together drawing, sculpture, moving image, books, sound and light around a recurring idea in her work: presence.
The exhibition opens with “Infinite Library,” where drawings and films are projected across shelves filled with upside-down books. The structure eventually opens to reveal “Mirror Maze,” an environment of reflective glass that folds the visitor into the work itself.
Elsewhere, “Line of Light” began with Devlin waking one morning to a narrow strip of illumination. At Futura Seoul, the installation connects artificial light inside the building with the natural landscape beyond it. Upstairs, “Screenshare” transforms hundreds of sketchbooks accumulated over Devlin’s career into a monumental moving image of drawings, notes and fragments from past projects.
At the center of the exhibition is a new iteration of “Come Home Again.” Originally rooted in Devlin’s encounters with threatened species in London, the work now brings together animals and plants from both London and Seoul through drawing, spoken voices and choral recordings, expanding the exhibition’s idea of presence beyond the human.
Participation continues with “Collective Portrait,” where visitors sit across from strangers and draw one another at a shared table, leaving the portraits behind to accumulate throughout the run of the show.
Rather than presenting a straightforward retrospective, 3rd Poem operates more like a living environment, where strangers read, draw, reflect and briefly share the same space before moving on.
‘3rd Poem: Es Devlin, Come Home Again’ is on view at FUTURA SEOUL through January 17, 2027.
FUTURA SEOUL
61 Bukchon-ro,
Jongno District, Seoul
South Korea
