Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me (Paperback)

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Western Union: small boats and Ten Thousand Waves explore the movement of people across countries and continents. Reflecting on unfinished journeys, Julien connects stories across different times, places and experiences. 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. 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. A fundamental aspect of the work, is that the museum is a ‘private home staged as a museum’ which centres the question of what ‘home’ is for all the artefacts that it contains. In having his own mother, Rosemary, narrate the film in a French Creole dialect which originates in Saint Lucia, a sense of displacement infuses the experience of the film.

The films don’t physically achieve this either (as a point in fact, they cannot), but as artworks exploring space and history through performance and narrative, they understand that the creation of buildings and spaces and their use over time is an essentially collective human endeavour. The exhibition presents a selection of key works from Julien’s ground-breaking early films and immersive three-screen videos made for the gallery setting, to the kaleidoscopic, sculptural multi-screen installations for which he is renowned today. Together, they explore how Julien breaks down barriers between different artistic disciplines by drawing from film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture. Sound is a critical ingredient to Julien’s work. He has said of “Looking for Langston,” an iconic piece from 1989, “Before I was looking, I was listening.” Maidment says, “The sounds carry just as much weight, significance, and meaning as the beautiful image sequences themselves.” She calls them “sonic tapestries” that draw you through the exhibition as it unfolds. “We wanted this spatially to echo the logic of Julien’s practice, crisscrossing through time.”A panel including Isaac Julien will explore the main themes of the artist’s exhibition, followed by an audience Q&A.

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. Isaac Julien’s What Freedom Is To Me is less an exhibition than a state of suspended animation. You emerge from hours immersed in lush multi-screen film works transformed, as though hovering above the earth like the white-robed goddess in Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010). Filmmaker and installation artist, Isaac Julien KBE RA, was born in 1960 in London. His work breaks down the barriers between different artistic disciplines, drawing from and commenting on film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting, and sculpture, and uniting them to construct powerful visual narratives through multi-screen film installations. His 1989 documentary-drama exploring author Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance titled Looking for Langston garnered Julien a cult following while his 1991 debut feature Young Soul Rebels won the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival.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. 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. Curiously, Julien’s experimental efforts from the 1980s – presented, beyond the main show’s pale, in a corridor at the start, and touching on, for instance, that decade’s HIV epidemic – are much rawer and more rampaging than his lavish later productions, showing up how tasteful and genteel his work became. It’s a mystifying trajectory. Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is to Me is a retrospective of the London-born artist/filmmaker’s 40-year career. Ingenious design by Julien in collaboration with architect David Adjaye makes the exhibition’s central atrium into something akin to the Wood Between the Worlds in CS Lewis’s Narnia, where pools of water are portals into any number of different worlds. Here, different coloured, carpeted corridors lead off into the various realms created by the artist, from 1920s and 1930s Harlem with his film about the poet Langston Hughes, to a documentary about Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, to a tragic piece about the 23 Chinese workers who drowned in Morecambe Bay in 2004. Some films are represented by vivid red, others teal and so on. It’s a striking conceit and works well the material. Visitors are given a precis of the work, a small-screen preview and its runtime, before taking the plunge.