Flight by Arabella Dorman review: relic of a rough crossing illustrates refugee crisis

St James’s church, Piccadilly, London
Dorman’s heartfelt installation in the shelter of a beautiful Wren church asks you to think about the unthinkable cruelty of our time

To say that Arabella Dorman’s artwork Flight is totally inadequate to the reality it wants to make us see is not intended as dismissal – far from it. What artistic response would be sufficient to the deaths of more than 3,600 people this year trying to cross the Mediterranean in flimsy, overcrowded or unseaworthy vessels, sometimes locked below decks in boats left to drift and sink?

If Rembrandt painted the plight of refugees trying to reach Europe and Bach composed an oratorio for the unveiling, it would still seem a flimsy gesture. Art cannot save lives. It cannot replace a drowned child. Even to make art about something so obscene may be a kind of betrayal, a hypocritical gesture of fake sympathy. So it was right that instead of an art world opening with clinking glasses, Dorman’s installation in St James’s church, Piccadilly, was inaugurated with prayers and meditation at Sunday communion.

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