Wigmore Hall, the iconic London chamber music venue, will host a major premiere next season exploring the experience of the refugee. Called Ungrievable Lives, the collaboration between composer Charlotte Bray and artist Caroline Burraway will then tour to other European venues during the course of the 2022/23 season.

Bray's string quartet will take its name from Burraway’s art installation, which comprises 13 children’s dresses made from refugee lifejackets gathered by the artist at the Lifejacket Graveyard in Lesvos.

Three of the dresses made from lifejackets by Caroline Burraway

Describing her experience of visiting the site where the thousands of life jackets used by refugees arriving on the Greek island have been put, Burraway said: ‘As I stood at the edge of the chasm, it felt like a physical blow – below me mountains of discarded lifejackets, many metres deep, lay quietly abandoned, decaying, buried in the stillness of the surrounding valley. My feet sank into the depths below as I made my way through thousands of loudly shouting colours, each shape evoking the suffocating presence of an abandoned body. Straight away, I knew I needed somehow to bring a sense of this to those who neither would, nor could ever see it, never have the chance to feel it themselves’.

Each dress, made from these life jackets, represents 1 million of the 13 million child refugees worldwide, and are described as: ‘Dirty, torn, patched together, a mixture of faded oranges, pinks and reds, at first glance they look like any small 3/4 year old dress a young child may wear, your child, my child, any child … but a closer look slowly confronts the viewer with the realisation of what they’re made from and what they embody. Some dresses bear the name of the country they sailed from stamped across their chest like a fashion slogan, some have motifs of little animals playing happily, their whistles hanging down as if in play.’

The project hopes to encourage audiences to ask themselves: ‘What is the differential value of a Western life compared to the value of the life of the refugee, arriving at the border of the Western world?’

The premiere was unveiled at the launch of the Wigmore Hall’s 2022/3 season, of which it forms a part. Opening on September 1, the season will see more than 2,500 musicians perform in 450 concerts, and together with Bray’s work will include more than 40 world, UK or London premieres.

Just a mere handful of the artists appearing demonstrates their breadth: Associate Artist Nitin Sawhney; cellists Steven Isserlis, Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Alisa Weilerstein; singers Ian Bostridge, Christian Gerhaher and Karita Mattila; pianists Leif Ove Andsnes, Stephen Hough and Yuja Wang; violinists Hilary Hahn, Leonidas Kavakos and Christian Tetzlaff; and Ensembles including Les Arts Florissants, Quatuor Ebène and Wigmore Hall Associate Artists the Takács Quartet.

25,000 tickets across the season will be made available at £5 to under-35s, as well as thousands of free tickets for under-26s through Wigmore Hall's partnership with the Cavatina Chamber Music Trust. For full details, visit Wigmore Hall's website.