Tate Britain celebrates 40 years of Isaac Julien

Museum is presenting the UK’s first ever survey exhibition honouring the influential work of British artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien.

SIR ISAAC JULIEN, one of the most innovative artists and filmmakers of our time, will be the subject of the UK’s first ever survey exhibition at Tate Britain.

The exhibition, titled: What Freedom Is To Me, will feature 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.

Born in 1960 in London, Julien is a pioneering artist who lives and works in the capital 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 Europé

Spanning four decades from the 1980s to the present day, this ambitious solo show exhibition will chart the development of his pioneering work in film and video, revealing a career that remains as fiercely experimental and politically charged as it was 40 years ago.

“I think it’s really very exciting to be able to show my work that I have been working on for some time, all in one place at Tate Britain,” Julien told Lifestyle ahead of the exhibition.

“A lot of my works have been made and shown abroad, especially over the last 20 years, so it’s great to bring all of the works of which several have been made here in London or the UK and share those in your home city.”

He added: “I’ve been up to quite a few things, so it’s great to be able to share all of those works with everybody and I’m

By Joel Campbell

quite excited to see the response.

“I haven’t had a solo show since I exhibited my work since just before the Turner Prize at the South London Gallery, so it’s quite a long time not to have an exhibition in a museum context.

“To have it in a museum like the Tate of course, where everybody goes, and to be assembling works across 40 years, both The Voice and I have that in common I guess, in terms of the years we have been making our presence felt.”

Barriers

Julien is internationally acclaimed for his compelling lyrical films and video art installations that explore how he breaks down barriers between different artistic disciplines by drawing from film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture.

His use of these varied disciplines is evident in his pivotal film exploring Black, queer desire – Looking for Langston (1989) –which brings together poetry and image to look at the private world of the Black artists and writers who were part of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

The exhibition will open with Julien’s earliest experiments in moving images, produced in the context of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. Four works from this period will be brought together at Tate Britain, including his first film, Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983) — conceived as a response to the unrest following the death of a young man at the entrance to a police station, Territories (1984), which focuses on the Black British experience in the early 80s, and This is Not An AIDS Advertisement (1987), an important work of LGBTQIA+ history that continues to resonate powerfully today.

Julien said: “I think what people who visit are going to get is the possibility to experience lot’s of different works from different times. Works from the eighties and real early works, such as Who Killed Colin Roach?, which I made in 1983 when I was a stu- dent at Saint Martin’s School of Art,” Julien said.

“That work became very pertinent for me, especially thinking about 2020. When I made Lessons Of The Hour in 2019, which was a work about Frederick Douglass who was a freedom fighter abolitionist who lived in Scotland, there was a way in which it all linked back to the question about human rights and the question of freedom that black people have been fighting for.”

He added: “There are lots of different works and the eighties is a whole area. It’s when I was in the Sankofa Film and Video Collective when I first started making work. That period was also when my work started to get reviewed by The Voice actually, and dare I say, we weren’t happy about the reviews we got.”

He added: “The kinds of things that we thought in the Sankofa Film and Video Collective then, doesn’t escape me now, they are still similar thoughts. Of course, The Voice has matured, I have matured and I think that it’s really great that today there is a much deeper appreciation of the arts.”

Those who are lucky enough to attend Julien’s exhibition will notice his use of dance to articulate the movement of peoples across different continents, times and spaces, which is reflected in the pioneering three-screen film installation Western Union: Small Boats (2007) and the spectacular Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019).

In Western Union, a series of vignettes choreographed by the internationally renowned Russell Maliphant create a poetic reflec-

“There has never been an exhibition that looks back over his full career to date. This is an opportunity to do that and really celebrate what he’s achieved over those four decades and really look at his influence and just how important he is as a filmmaker and also as an artist working in installation.

“So that’s the starting point essentially, it’s really to chart his career from the eighties to the present day.” tion on African migration histories and the effects of trauma on people, buildings and monuments.

Speaking on selecting the works, Maidment said: “From the outset it’s been a really close dialogue with Isaac. It’s been such a pleasure to work with him. Of course, he’s based partially in London, this is his hometown, so it’s been very special to have that conversation with him. It’s a personal selection but also a concise edit, essentially, It would be impossible to show every work that Isaac’s made because he’s been so prolific.

A Marvellous Entanglement, meanwhile, features a stunning performance from Balé Folclórico da Bahia filmed at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia in Brazil, meditating on the legacy of visionary modernist architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi.

What Freedom Is To Me is curated by Isabella Maidment.

Speaking to Lifestyle about the process of whittling down the options of what to include in the exhibition, she said: “This was a long overdue opportunity to really survey Isaac Julien’s work across the full 40 years of his career. The first exhibition to do that.

“But this feels like a concise edit that feels representative of the arc of his career as a whole.”

In addition to Julien’s earlier works, the exhibition will also premiere the artist’s latest film, Once Again...(Never Die) (2022), exploring the relationship between US collector Albert C Barnes and the famed philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke, known as the ‘Father of the Harlem Renaissance’

The film examines their storied relationship, its mutually formative critical dialogue, and its significant impact on their work as educators and activists on behalf of various African American causes.

Julien’s critically acclaimed ten-screen film installation Lessons of the Hour (2019), a por- trait of the life and times of the self-liberated freedom fighter Frederick Douglass, will also be on display, representing Julien’s 40-year long commitment to cultural activism, the politics and poetics of image, and the moral and social influence of picturemaking.

“My newer work like Statues Never Die looks at the whole question around the returning of stolen African objects, and also the way in which in the 1920s these debates were ignited by Black philosophers like Alain Locke, who in conversation with Albert Barnes, was one of the catalyst collectors assembling African art at the time and putting that next to Matisse and Picasso’s work during that whole point in modernism.

Renaissance

“I guess in my work what I am trying to do, as I did in Looking For Langston, is to go back to the whole renaissance and look at this high point in Black modernist artistic production and say, we were there.

“And that there was this critical Black, queer presence, that was really at the forefront of constructing a Black arts move- ment, of which Alain Locke espoused.”

He added: “I think some of these debates are haunting the present and I think that’s what will happen a lot when people see the works, hopefully.

“I think what Isabella has done is choose different works that she feels will resonate with audiences and I am just really excited to see how that develops.”

Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me Tate Britain, April 26August 20, 2023

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS: Installation view of Once Again... Statues Never Die, Barnes Foundation 2022