A concert has a clock. A sculpture in a gallery asks for a different kind of attention. A folded page adds another possibility: the reader can decide how much of the object to open at once.
Es Devlin's work now brings those encounters unusually close together. Her retrospective, Other Worlds at London's Design Museum, opened on 2 October 2026 and runs until 4 April 2027. Alongside it sits a smaller object: a 16-page concertina cover made for Wallpaper*'s October issue.
The interesting question is what changes between them. A stage can organise a crowd's attention around the next cue. A museum can expose the decisions behind that moment. A page puts part of the sequence into the reader's hands.
What the archive can show
Other Worlds spans Devlin's 30-year practice. The museum identifies work ranging from The Lehman Trilogy to the London 2012 Olympic Games Closing Ceremony and the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show. Its reconstructed studio and circular 30-Year Desk bring books, sketches, objects and models into the account.
These are different kinds of evidence from a recording of a finished performance. A sketch can make an early possibility visible. A model gives an idea edges and proportions. An archive lets a visitor compare things that, during a show, might be separated by years of work or buried beneath the force of the final result.
That is what a retrospective can offer beyond a smaller version of a large spectacle. Scale becomes something to examine, rather than simply something to feel.
The museum has not abandoned theatrical timing. Its booking information specifies an introductory film and entry in 15-minute slots. This is a designed beginning, rather than an entirely open route. Within an exhibition, however, the time spent examining an object can become part of the visitor's own encounter with it. That is a different relationship from following a performance's cues.
A show is more than its objects
Whether the change succeeds is open to disagreement. In her Time Out review, India Lawrence admires Devlin's work but finds its museum presentation less convincing than the live performances it represents. The soundtrack and treatment of the archive are part of her objection. This is a critic's assessment, not proof that the exhibition has failed.
Rosa Bertoli's Wallpaper* account is warmer. It follows the move from studio to archive to Infinite Library and finds personal detail alongside large installations. Bertoli also discloses having worked with Devlin and her team on the magazine.
The disagreement identifies the problem more clearly than a list of famous commissions could. A model can explain a stage without reproducing what happened on it. Sound and light can give an exhibition its own atmosphere, but they cannot make every visitor share the original audience's experience.
The gallery therefore has two possible tasks: preserve a trace of a performance, and create a new encounter with its making. Judging only the first can miss what the second contributes. Treating the second as a complete substitute can oversell it.
A sequence you can hold
The Wallpaper* cover changes the scale again. The publisher's account of the object, published on 8 September, describes a fold-out panorama of Devlin's work. Perforations in its pages form an iris-like opening when the cover is closed, referring to her earlier Iris sculpture. The October issue name does not make this a new announcement this week.
Folding gives an image a physical sequence. Closed and opened, the object presents different arrangements of the same material. Unlike a projected film, it does not supply its own running time. A reader can pause halfway, open it further or close it again.
This is more than shrinking a photograph of a stage. It changes the action needed to see the work. The spectacle has become an object with a mechanism, and looking has acquired a small physical task.
The audience changes the scale, too
In a Frieze interview published on 9 October, Devlin describes the audience as central to her practice. The interview concerns her wider work; it does not claim that the exhibition and cover were devised to prove this comparison.
Still, the comparison offers a useful way into them. The stage asks people to meet a work at a particular time. The archive makes its construction available for closer attention. The folded page gives a reader an object to operate.
Something is lost when a live event becomes a model or an image. Something else becomes available: the chance to inspect a decision, compare a form, or control a sequence that once belonged to a performance. Devlin's change of scale is interesting because those possibilities do not amount to the same experience. They give the audience a different part to play.