Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me (Paperback)

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Confused? Me too. I can’t find a satisfactory way of responding to Isaac Julien’s installations. Trying to follow them rationally is frustrating because too much is happening at once. Regarding them as visual spectacle is more rewarding because of their beauty, but then you miss the points they are making. And since Julien’s work is fundamentally political, not to engage with the message seems like a cop out. “This gradual increase in scale– from one screen to two, to three, to five and so on,” he says, “has always been in service to ideas and theories.” Isaac Julien’s films can be beautiful, poetic and powerful, and they can also be frustrating and hard to follow. There are important ideas and concepts in this exhibition, though you may have to filter through the works to find them. Sir Isaac Julien (b.1960, London) is a pioneering British filmmaker and installation artist who lives and works in London and Santa Cruz, California. He received a BA in Fine Art Film from Central St. Martin’s School of Art in 1984 and completed his post-doctoral studies at Les Entrepreneurs de L’Audiovisuel Européen, Brussels in 1989. His 1989 documentary-drama Looking for Langston exploring author Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance garnered Julien a cult following, while his debut feature film Young Soul Rebels won the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991. Julien doesn’t just make films, he intervenes in the museum: “Radically and aesthetically, I want to aim for an experience that can offer a novel way to see moving images, in its choice of subject, in how it’s displayed, in how it’s been shot … in every aspect.” When it works well, the spectator feels part of that intervention, empowered, emboldened, and hopeful for the possibilities that arise from Julien’s works. Tate Britain presents the UK’s first ever survey exhibition celebrating the influential work of British artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien (b. London, 1960). One of the leading artists working today, Isaac Julien is internationally acclaimed for his compelling lyrical films and video art installations. This ambitious solo show will chart the development of his pioneering work in film and video over four decades from the 1980s through to the present day, revealing a career that remains as fiercely experimental and politically charged as it was forty years ago.

Julien presents a complex layering of sounds and images. This includes footage of Bo Bardi’s buildings, and staged performances of music, voice and movement. It also features readings by Brazilian actors Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, who portray the architect at different moments of her life. Performances by the dance company Balé Folclórico da Bahia also feature, filmed at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia. A panel including Isaac Julien will explore the main themes of the artist’s exhibition, followed by an audience Q&A.

Cybernetic Serendipity – a walk around the exhibition

The message of the film is crystal clear and the anger palpable, but Julien found the documentary format too restrictive. “I wanted to experiment, to create different visual auras, play with time… using factual material. My ultimate aim, really, was to create a style for political remembering.” With some examples running up to 40 minutes, a not inconsiderable amount of time is needed to view the exhibition in full. Julien’s work seems to adhere to the concept articulated by Bardi that “Linear time is a Western invention; time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement, where at any moment points can be chosen and solutions invented without beginning or end.” The films unreel at a languid pace and are mainly concerned with real events and historical figures. The Isaac Julien retrospective, What Freedom Means to Me, currently showing at Tate Britain, includes six films selected from across his more than thirty-year career. For the purposes of this review, I am going to focus on just two of them, which examine the lives and work of John Soane and Lina Bo Bardi respectively. All this fabulousness, though, provokes a fit of impatience, and a suspicion that Julien’s glozing camerawork bespeaks a middlebrow sensibility. There are shots here – indeed, entire sequences – that wouldn’t appear amiss in a Merchant-Ivory production. In my experience, good art doesn’t signal its artiness so needily. A unique chance to hear Isaac Julien discuss his lyrical films and video art with Tate Director Maria Balshaw, followed by a Q&A session.

Isaac Julien (born, London, 1960) constantly pushes the boundaries of filmmaking as an art form. His works tell important stories, prioritising aesthetics, poetry, movement and music as modes of communication. Social justice has been a consistent focus of his films, which explore the medium’s potential to collapse and expand traditional conceptions of history, space and time.It is difficult to decide whether to focus on one screen or to try and follow them all but ultimately even when focussing on one, your peripheral vision takes in elements the others. Which is not unlike being in a building or in a space. Not the same, certainly, but it is iterative, mimetic and poetic. That’s true, and while Julien’s work is admirably academic, rich in research and singular points of view, it is also possible, when you are watching the snow fall in Once Again… (Statues Never Die) or the calligraphy strokes in Ten Thousand Waves, that the outside world may disappear for a transcendent moment or two. “That could be a response, and that would be great,” Julien says, a little enigmatically. “That would be a raison d’être, so to speak.” Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic practice is so familiar to us; it is easy to forget he began his pioneering work over 100 years ago. Muybridge was working on animal locomotion before Picasso was born, and the painter and sculptor Edgar Degas (amongst other artists of that time) used Muybridge’s photographs to understand how to image bodies in motion This landmark book reveals the scope of Julien’s pioneering practice from the 1980s to the present day. It includes some of his early projects as part of Sankofa Film and Video Collective (1983–92); his critically acclaimed ten-screen video installation The main exhibition focuses on the multi-screen installations that Julien went on to develop and which, by their very nature, demand their own space. And working with architect David Adjaye, he has created an ingenious layout that provides each piece with a separate room.

In doing this, the artist holds up a (metaphorical) Soanian convex mirror to its audience and wonders if, confronted with both the official narrative of the museum and its contents alongside a more affective interpretation, our views on the repatriation of historic artefacts would be quite as certain as we might think they are. Tate Britain presents the UK’s first ever survey exhibition celebrating the influential work of British artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien (b. London, 1960). One of the leading artists working today, Isaac Julien is internationally acclaimed for his compelling lyrical films and video art installations. This ambitious solo show charts the development of his pioneering work in film and video over four decades from the 1980s through to the present day, revealing a career that remains as fiercely experimental and politically charged as it was forty years ago. As Julien explains it: “This gradual increase in scale – from one to two, to three, to five [screens], and so on – has always been in service to ideas and theories: film as sculpture, film and architecture, the dissonance between images, movement, and the mobile spectator.” And therein lies the power of these filmic installations, situated as they are around a particular gallery space, images shifting across screens and all the while spectators moving around the space. The mobile spectator, to use Julien’s own term, is active, engaged and entirely in control of their own journey and experience as they travel though a fluid exhibition space designed by the artist with the architect David Adjaye. According to his cinematographer Nina Kellgren, Julien is a “poet” and a “painter” who “trades on the fact that we can all speak images”. If so, he’s fluent in the visual languages of commercial advertising and music videos; on at least one occasion, he even deploys dry ice. Everything is glossy. Nothing is real.The essayshighlight Julien’s critical thinking and the way his work breaks down barriers between different artistic disciplines, drawing from film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture by using the themes of desire, history and culture. Here is A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), honouring the wild architecture of the Italian modernist Lina Bo Bardi, filmed across seven public buildings she designed for Brazil. Some are still in use, with their cave-mouth doors and windows and their curious cylinders of light. Others are derelict, and haunted by the spirit of the architect herself, played by two different women. Seeing a single work by Julien can make an impact if we have the time to sit down and mull it over. But with multiple works, this exhibition is suited to being consumed over the course of an entire day or through several visits – a luxury we all wish we had, but most Tate Britain visitors won’t. The short journey from the British Museum down to Tate Britain is currently a rewarding trip. The British Museum gives us, with the exhibition dedicated to Shah Abbas, the early 17th century unifier of Iran, a clear comparison as to how a portraitist can contextualise his sitter. Julien’s work draws from so many areas: film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting, sculpture and more. The love for dance is evident in how people move within these films, across them and between time. These are weavings of artistic disciplines, collaged and montaged to fill the imagination. And they are exhilarating to experience.