London<\/a> Olympics, the work arrives at a moment when Britain feels increasingly atomised by political fury, algorithmic distraction and loneliness.<\/p>\n\u201cI am in no way trying to erase the differences between us or suggesting that everyone can agree with each other,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I\u2019m hoping that if we can take the time to exist together in a non-verbal moment, perhaps we can accept that we can all coexist.\u201d<\/p>\n
People from all over the UK will be able to participate in the collective digital portrait. Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
The installation is deliberately imperfect: faces do not blend cleanly into one another, but snag and jar before separating again.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere will be times in the collective portrait where one face merges into another and it looks terrible; where a beard meshes with a female face in a weird way before it resolves itself,\u201d Devlin said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I find that aspect quite truthful when you\u2019re speaking of the impossibility of crossing the boundaries between us. If we can accept imperfections, then perhaps we can accept each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
The project has taken three years to build. Working with engineers and technicians at Google Arts & Culture Lab, Devlin trained an image-generation model on her own hand-drawn portraits so that participants\u2019 selfies could be translated into something closer to physical drawing than a digital filter.<\/p>\n
The collaboration, however, sits inside another profound contradiction: that at a moment when artists across the world are fighting against the use of their work to train AI systems, Devlin has willingly offered up her own artistic \u201cshadow\u201d to a technology company.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m very aware that my shadow \u2013 and the shadow of many other artists \u2013 is being put in the service of the system of industrial capitalism to make a few people very wealthy,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Es Devlin working on a portrait: \u2018This is an act of reappropriation of technologies that are being used to separate us, distract us.\u2019 Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Yet Devlin says the project is intended not as surrender but reclamation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to take the technologies and do what Wendy did for Peter Pan: I want to dance with my own shadow in an act of resistance. This is an act of reappropriation of technologies that are being used to separate us, distract us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Outside the gallery, Britain can feel loud with division: people sealed inside personalised feeds, arguments sharpened into identities, public life conducted at the pitch of permanent outrage.<\/p>\n
Devlin\u2019s response is unexpectedly analogue in spirit. She speaks not about technology but about attention, about the increasingly rare experience of sitting quietly with another human being \u2013 and really looking at them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re in an age of destruction, fragmentation, separation, isolation,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to resist that. I want to invite people to consider ways that we can cease to be distracted and instead reimagine national identity as a process of always changing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The work also marks her attempt to throw open the doors of an institution that, she acknowledges, can still feel intimidatingly grand. Alongside the installation, Devlin will lead free portrait-drawing workshops at the gallery, while online classes will allow people to participate from elsewhere in the country.<\/p>\n
She hopes eventually to take both the collective portrait and the drawing workshops into town halls, libraries and schools around the UK.<\/p>\n
Ravinder Tagarh, a security guard at the gallery, stands alongside his portrait. Photograph: Es Devlin<\/p>\n
\u201cI want people who can\u2019t come to the gallery to have the chance to discover drawing and experience being drawn \u2013 the process of being seen in a moment of silence without judging or being judged over beliefs and life experiences,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Among the first people to contribute a portrait was Ravinder Tagarh, a 26-year-old security guard at the gallery who arrived in the UK in 2023 to study. While grateful to Britain, he said the past few years had often felt lonely, and that \u201cpeople have not always been really very friendly\u201d.<\/p>\n
Seeing his own face appear on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery affected him more deeply than he expected. \u201cIt felt emotional to have my portrait on the wall of an institution like the National Portrait Gallery, next to the king and queen \u2013 and Harry Styles and Marcus Rashford,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt felt good to be seen \u2013 to think someone might recognise me, a security guard, because they\u2019d seen my portrait up there. It made me feel part of this country instead of an outsider.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he paused. \u201cIt gave me a moment of hope.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Can a collective portrait of Britain hold together a country that feels as if it is splintering apart?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":959430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-959429","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116573342746404109","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/959430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}