Freedom pervades the work of British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julian. Over four decades, he has produced boundary-pushing work that tackles racism, homophobia, immigration and colonialism, from experimental documentaries to his gorgeous multi-screen installations. In all of them, an activist spirit is offset by gorgeous imagery and sound.
Some critics find Julian’s films too beautiful for their unwieldy subject matter, and like many of his high-profile British black peers in the 1980s, his aesthetic innovations , long overlooked by the British art world. See his work through the reducing lens of identity.
The large-scale exhibition now at London’s Tate Britain is the culmination of a trajectory that began in the margins of films for television and cinema, and evolved into the more elaborate ones belonging to gallery settings. Entitled What Freedom Is to Me, the show, which runs until August 20, is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work ever performed in his home country. The title comes from singer Nina Simone’s words in a 1968 interview, “Let me tell you what freedom means to me: don’t be afraid.”
“Liberty issues are not just related to rights and justice issues,” Julian said in an interview at his North London studio on the Canal. It’s also a matter of form and aesthetics, he said. “It has to do with the story you want to tell and how it’s told.”
The exhibition traces the arc of Julian’s career, including five single-screen films and six gorgeous installations from the 1980s, housed within a hexagonal structure designed by architect David Adjaye. Julian’s activist documentary, Who Killed Colin Roach? It is exhibited near magnificent works such as. This is a tapestry of cinema that interweaves themes of queer desire, Black Her modernism, and cultural restoration. , which incorporates multiple screens and mirrors.
In addition to its sonic and visual ingenuity, the work’s interdisciplinary content reflects Julian’s collaboration with musicians, dancers, writers, and thinkers such as poet Derek Walcott, writer Bell Hook, and cultural theorist Stuart Hall. It shows a deep connection.
“Isaac is at the forefront of challenging our ideas about both race, gender, sexuality and queer history,” Maria Barshaw, director of the Tate Museum group, said in an interview. He was also very experimental. He has greatly expanded the language of motion pictures and films. “
One of Julian’s most daring early works is “Looking for Langston.” This is a voluptuous, fantastical film montage inspired by the Hughes of the hidden gay poet Langston, who shines a light on the queer black creative voices of his Harlem Renaissance. Julien came to the public’s attention when it was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1989. Julian said that until then, black gay voices “really didn’t exist” in the film.
Produced at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, “Looking for Langston” is a luscious black-and-white tableau vivant of men dancing and kissing in a 1920s drag ball-inspired sequence. It is a celebration of black gay sexuality. .
cinematic Lyrically blending archival footage and photography with acting sequences to fill in gaps from the historical record became Julien’s signature, drawing on Martinique-born postcolonial thinkers such as Franz Fanon and African-American abolitionists. , was adopted in subsequent works commemorating other cultural and political figures. Frederick Douglass.
“Isaac has become a role model for new ways of mining archives,” said American artist Glenn Lygon. “Isaac’s work deals with what can be expressed through the archives and what must be imagined, and his confluence between the two. This was the revolution when ‘Searching for Langston’ came out.” was.”
A strong sense of social justice has underpinned Julian’s practice from the beginning. Born in East London in 1960 to parents who immigrated to England from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Julian grew up in a rugged inner-city housing complex against a backdrop of police brutality, anti-immigrant demonstrations and a rise in power. He grew up with his four siblings on the project. of Margaret Thatcher’s tough brand of conservatism.
At St Martin’s School of Art in the early 1980s, he encountered the intense cross-pollination of fashion, art and club culture, and switched from studying painting to film. dance and theater. During his university studies, he founded his Sankofa Film and Video Collective with four of his collaborators, aiming to develop an independent black film culture while interacting with world cinema.
Rooted in feminist and postcolonial approaches, Sankofa has produced guilty essay-like films dealing with homosexuality, classism and racism. These include the documentary “Territories,” which splices footage of her carnival on the streets of Afro-Caribbean in 1984. — Images of step-by-step gay sexual encounters and a reggae soundtrack.
1980s to early 1990s Ateliers such as Sankofa and the Black Audio Film Collective, which found outlets on Channel 4, a new public broadcaster founded in 1982, emerged to support diverse voices in film and television.
Mark Nash, Julian’s life partner and British curator who has collaborated on his films since they met in the 1980s, recalled the period as “an exciting cultural moment” both in the UK and abroad. In 1991, Julien won an award at the Cannes Film Festival for Young Soul Rebels, a gay love story about a white punk rocker and a black pirate radio DJ. “T-shirts; designer Jean Paul Gaultier threw a party for us,” added Nash. “There was a sense that the world of cinema would open up a lot, but it didn’t.”
Around the mid-1990s, Nash said creative opportunities declined as British film and television commissioning became more conservative. The couple both took teaching positions at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995, and Julian later taught a blaxploitation film course at Harvard University. Both returned to the University of California in 2018 and are still professors.
The mid-90s was also a pivotal moment in Julian’s practice, moving away from broadcast and theatrical films and toward gallery work. He said he began making works that spanned two, three, and five screens, attracted by the greater artistic autonomy that the art world offered. Julien’s kaleidoscope of multi-screens His installations invite viewers to move around and embrace multiple fragmented perspectives at once. Sometimes you’ll see a synchronized narrative across screens, and sometimes blank screens and repeated images interrupt the flow.
“I hope it will be a way to forget what we look like,” he said, adding that movie audiences tend to be dictated by mainstream film conventions. There is no room for people to think differently or to visualize themselves differently than traditional cultures,” he said. “By presenting things in novel ways, we can create space for new identities and possibilities,” he added.
The practice of what Julian calls “mobile spectatorship”—moving viewers around to understand what is happening—is part of his nine-screen extravaganza, Ten Thousand Waves (2010). ) is exemplified. Taking the drowning of more than 20 of his Chinese immigrants off the north coast of England in 2004 as a starting point, this installation immerses the viewer in the sounds and sights of the waves. Footage of the tragedy is intertwined with a retelling of the 1934 Chinese silent film Goddess. This is a reference to an ancient Chinese goddess believed to protect a woman who sells sex to feed her son and fishermen.
Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who exhibited Ten Thousand Waves in 2013, described the work as a “huge leap” in Julien’s practice. In a telephone interview, he said the artist worked like a “master conductor of a symphony” and “combined all these very subtle effects that you never see but you feel: sound, screen.” The placement of your body, your movements, your body, the flickering of images, the pace at which they unfold before your eyes, the moments when things coalesce and fall apart.”
In addition to exhibiting at MoMA, Julien has presented her work at prestigious international exhibitions such as the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Maxi Museum in Rome, Documenta in Germany in 2002 and the Venice Biennale in 2015. Tate director Balshaw said a career retrospective in Julian’s hometown was “a long awaited one.”
In a further sign of his support by the British establishment, last year Julian was made a Knight of the British Empire, one of Britain’s highest honors. Julian said the name of the award was “really problematic”, but added that he was happy to be honored. It came shortly after being elected to the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts where he exhibited (the sale of the canvas enabled him to purchase one of the first Super 8 video cameras).
Still, Julian said he never stopped painting. His films have a certain pictorial quality, often showing figures surveying sublime natural or architectural landscapes, like the figures in the landscapes of the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. .
what are they looking for?
Julian laughed and said “Freedom” in a theatrical whisper.
