Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me (Paperback)

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Although the legacies of slavery are still felt today, financially and socially, something about looking back to that time to a Black viewer can have a sense of ‘here we go again’. There’s a cacophony of noise, even before you enter the show, from televisions displaying Julien’s 1987 short work, This Is Not An AIDS Advertisement, and his first film, Who Killed Colin Roach? This ambitious solo exhibition reveals the scope of Julien’s pioneering work in film and installation from the early 1980s through to the present day. He says: “As we mature as artists in the mythical diasporic dream space, the culture of infinite possibility is ready to receive us.

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. It is a tribute to the British art-viewing public and the artist that most viewers I witnessed planted themselves on the benches or folding chairs provided, or sat on the floor, and watched the videos all the way through, or at least for long stretches of time.

The exhibition is being developed in cooperation with Tate Britain, London, where it will be on view from April 27 to August 20, 2023.

Sadly, the downside to Julien’s atemporality is the realization that things have not changed much, and progress is an illusion. I don’t know how successful this current government will be in stopping those global movements taking place, because they’ll happen whether we like it or not. As though to remind audiences of the extent to which Julien is an artist as much as he is a film-maker, the central space of the exhibition – from which a number of walkways lead to individual screening rooms – contains enlarged photographs relating to the exhibited films, including What Freedom is to Me (Homage) FIG.Hot colours, languid imagery, the focus on showy details, all of it converges with the smooth movement of each film – gliding gradually through buildings, forests and cities, on trams, trains and slow boats. The sound of rotor blades and the pilot’s dryly pragmatic commentary are juxtaposed with figures from Chinese myth and history. He includes existing footage of Barthé, moments from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s seminal film Statues Never Die (1953) and Ghanaian film-maker Nii Kwate Owoo’s 1970 footage of African objects in the British Museum, alongside stunning original sequences. Once Again… (Statues Never Die) revisits and expands on these themes; it dramatises a dialogue between Locke (played by André Holland) and Albert C.

People’s looks started to change slightly when African populations began to grow within these vicinities,” he notes.Before he arrives, dressed glamorously in black Issey Miyake pleats, his assistants show me his latest film, the relatively quiet Once Again … (Statues Never Die), an immersive five-screen installation.

His pioneering work in film explores a variety of issues including black identity, diaspora, migration and capital. Tate curators Isabella Maidment and Nathan Ladd worked closely with Julien and his long-term friend, the architect David Adjaye to imagine and design the exhibition. Locke then encounters Albert C Barnes, an early 20th-century collector of African art, and they debate its place – stolen, often violently, from its custodians – in the modern museum. This exhibition has been designed in partnership with architect David Adjaye, and together, Julien explains, they sought to create “an invitation to become enveloped by the images”.On two screens, her image is reflected, mirrored: the dichotomy of Julien needing to contend with the museum, and yet fantasizing about its distortion. The beauty of the landscape and the cool colour palette make room for contemplative and spiritual viewing. Vagabondia, created in 2000, is set in the Soane Museum in Central London, and imagines – through the eyes of a black female curator, the invisible histories of the artefacts and the legacy of the vast undertaking of their extraction and relocation to the UK (of which the Soane Museum is a small but notable example). Using distinctly Soanian techniques of reflection, doubling, shadow and allusion the film evokes the repressed histories of the artefacts.