Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me (Paperback)

Product Information

In 1989, he debuted his short film, Looking for Langston, which explores the world of Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance through the lens of playwright Langston Hughes.

He became acquainted with the fables of Mazu, a 15th-century deity from the Fujian province, from where the cockle pickers had also travelled. His indulgence of that urge leavens the message; it’s an unusual dynamic that has a devastating point. By then, he had graduated from Central Saint Martins and co-formed Sankofa Film and Video Collective, whose best known work, The Passion of Remembrance, Julien co-directed with Maureen Blackwood. Music is an ever-important accompaniment to Julien’s films, and although each of them is screened in a separate room, strains from other soundtracks filter in and intermingle. Where elsewhere his poetic allusions never lose sight of their subject, here they feel oblique and unfocused.It all streams before you in coruscating black and white on five double-sided screens, themselves reflected in mirrors all around the gallery, and with a spectacular score and arias performed by the black singer Alice Smith.

You can sense Julien’s appreciation and understanding of dance and movement, particularly in his three-screen film installation “Western Union: Small Boats” (2007). Others are derelict, and haunted by the spirit of the architect herself, played by two different women. It is difficult within the scope of a review like this to take on such an expansive subject, including, as was pointed out to me on Twitter by Adam Nathaniel Furman, the architect’s more controversial political allegiances. Dance and choreography emerge throughout the exhibition as art forms beloved by Julien, also evident in various scenes in Looking for Langston and the choreography that characterises Vagabondia, which was filmed in the Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.Artist Isaac Julien’ first Tate retrospective covers 40 years of work specialising in film, photography and installation exploring activism, selfhood, how we make histories, knowledge and Black and queer identity. Filmed in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the piece also interrogates the role of such institutions in light of current restitution debates.

That museum and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia are among the settings for Julien’s gripping study of contested heritage, African art and modernism, as well as the meeting of art and poetry, and the queer desire so fundamental to Hughes, Locke and their artist peers like Richmond Barthé, and a consistent theme in Julien’s own work. In the wider perspective of the exhibition, the early works are sidelined in favor of a selection of his more finished and cinematographic work ranging from 1989 to the present.The film opens with an imaginary vision of Hughes’s funeral, the deceased played by Julien himself, motionless against white drapes in a coffin. They wander through her art museum, where the paintings project from resin bases like gravestones in a cemetery, down spiralling staircases, followed by dancers in descending flurries, through Bo Bardi’s São Paulo theatre with its bare wooden seats. Barnes (played by Danny Huston), a collector and exhibitor of African material culture who founded the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in 1922.

In 2002, he participated in documenta11 in the preparatory platform on the topic of “Creolization” in Santa Lucia, as well as with the video installation Paradise Omeros. Adjaye’s team has also designed Julien’s imminent career retrospective at Tate Britain, which will display the artist and film-maker’s exploration of migration, history, sexuality and culture through composite multiscreen installations that can make you feel as if you’re actually inside the work. View image in fullscreen ‘Silver-screen glamour’: Pas de Deux With Roses, from Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston series, 1989/2016.Simon Henley and Gavin Hale-Brown met at the University of Liverpool in 1986 and have been friends ever since, forming their award-winning practice together in 1995. Looking for Langston was shown at the Barbican in 2020, and it was startling when Todd Terry’s 1988 acid house classic Can You Party? This experimental exploration of the Notting Hill Carnival – as much a cultural phenomenon and socio-political signifier, as it is all-around good time – reflects on the historical politicisation of police surveillance that the Afro-Caribbean community was often subjected to during the 1980s.