The Everythingists, the latest installation by Es Devlin, is now on view at V&A East Storehouse from May 4th to October 18th, 2026. Conceived within the New Work: Making East London programme, it offers a radiant, thought-driven exploration of Everythingism—a way of thinking that resists borders between disciplines, histories, and modes of expression, and instead lets them collide and coexist.
Everythingism—a conversation across time
The term traces back to Natalia Goncharova, whose early 20th-century practice embraced multiplicity over purity. Devlin picks up this thread, drawing on Goncharova’s stage designs for The Firebird, created with Igor Stravinsky and Mikhail Fokine for the Ballets Russes. Rather than treating this lineage as distant history, she places it in motion—allowing fragments of modernism to resonate within a contemporary visual and sonic language. What emerges is less a narrative than a field of references, where past and present remain in constant negotiation.
Light, movement, and a shifting structure
The installation takes shape as a luminous environment of stacked plywood forms, recalling both museum storage crates and the modular logic of digital packaging. Within this constructed landscape, dancer Joshua Shanny-Wynter moves through a choreography by Botis Seva, tracing a dialogue between body and structure.
The atmosphere shifts in measured intervals: light flickers and recedes, Devlin’s voice enters in layered fragments, and a sound composition by Polyphonia threads through the space, echoing motifs from The Firebird. Text appears and dissolves—drawn from Goncharova’s Rayonist manifesto, alongside contemporary voices such as Cory Doctorow—forming a dense weave of ideas rather than a fixed storyline.
An open system of experience
The Everythingists resists the idea of an exhibition as something to be simply viewed. Instead, it operates as a network of relationships—between disciplines, between eras, and between viewer and environment. At Victoria and Albert Museum’s East Storehouse, archive and performance no longer sit apart; they circulate through one another, asking the visitor to engage not just as observer, but as participant in an ever-shifting composition.
Step into the visionary world of Es Devlin in our interview, where she reflects on the power of repetition, the language of architecture, and the dialogue between creativity and the natural world.
