Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me (Paperback)

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Seeing a single work by Julien can make an impact if we have the time to sit down and mull it over. But with multiple works, this exhibition is suited to being consumed over the course of an entire day or through several visits – a luxury we all wish we had, but most Tate Britain visitors won’t. The exhibition design by Adjaye Associates encourages the viewer to explore the space and walk in and out of the film works, which total about 4.5 hours (Tate also allows re-entry to the exhibition). The approach is in line with a theory of a mobile spectator that the artist has been developing in his practice, pushing the boundaries of how audiences engage with film and installation art. Another dimension to Julien’s work is sound, which he says is ‘50 per cent of the work’. Music plays a huge role in his films, as does the sound design, which adds to their transcendental quality.

Vagabondia was filmed in Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. The film focuses on the dreams and fantasies of a conservator walking the halls of the museum at night. She is transported to a dreaming state, imagining hidden histories behind the collection of paintings, sculptures and architectural relics. In this fantasy, the objects appear to fold in on themselves as time and space are collapsed. 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. According to his cinematographer Nina Kellgren, Julien is a “poet” and a “painter” who “trades on the fact that we can all speak images”. If so, he’s fluent in the visual languages of commercial advertising and music videos; on at least one occasion, he even deploys dry ice. Everything is glossy. Nothing is real. The following year, 21-year-old Colin Roach was shot at the entrance to Stoke Newington Police Station and this time Julien felt he had to respond. “I was determined,” he said, “to appropriate video art techniques and repurpose them for the street.” Made with Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Who Killed Colin Roach?, 1983 records the demonstrations that followed and the Roach family’s demand for a public enquiry.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. What Freedom Is To Me presents a selection of Julien’s expansive career. Places, events, and historical moments recur throughout Julien’s films: from Notting Hill Carnival, to 1920s Harlem and abolition movements. Here is A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), honouring the wild architecture of the Italian modernist Lina Bo Bardi, filmed across seven public buildings she designed for Brazil. Some are still in use, with their cave-mouth doors and windows and their curious cylinders of light. Others are derelict, and haunted by the spirit of the architect herself, played by two different women. Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is to Me Charting 40 years of the film-maker’s career, this exhibition immerses its audience in slavery, immigration and homophobia. This is cultural activism at its best Despite his tremendous international status, it is not so surprising that there has been no major retrospective of Julien’s work in London before – it’s a lot of time to fit into one space. At a guess there’s more than five hours of film work here. I spent three and a half hours in the show and left guiltily aware that I’d short-changed it.

The Chinese movie turns from monochrome into magenta, cerise, cerulean and lime. Julien’s high interest in colour extends to the aspect of every single thing in every scene. His camera dwells on shimmering makeup, coiffed hair, buttons, stitches and velvet, on honed bodies and chiselled faces, bentwood furniture and the breeze lifting a gauzy blind. It slips in and out of The World of Interiors. 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). Tate Britain's important exhibition of Bridget Riley's painting ends later this month. This is a full retrospective, which was not possible at the recent exhibitions of her work at the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. Julien doesn’t just make films, he intervenes in the museum: “Radically and aesthetically, I want to aim for an experience that can offer a novel way to see moving images, in its choice of subject, in how it’s displayed, in how it’s been shot … in every aspect.” When it works well, the spectator feels part of that intervention, empowered, emboldened, and hopeful for the possibilities that arise from Julien’s works. Francis Bacon (1909-1992) at Tate Britain heralds the artist’s centenary in 2009. It is the first retrospective since 1985, enabling a re-assessment of his work, although the exhibitions in Edinburgh, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads (2005) and Norwich, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (2006) at the Sainsbury Centre have been significantOne of the leading artists working today, Isaac Julien is internationally acclaimed for his compelling lyrical films and video art installations. This ambitious solo show will chart the development of his pioneering work in film and video over four decades from the 1980s through to the present day, revealing a career that remains as fiercely experimental and politically charged as it was forty years ago. Isaac Julien’s films can be beautiful, poetic and powerful, and they can also be frustrating and hard to follow. There are important ideas and concepts in this exhibition, though you may have to filter through the works to find them. A unique chance to hear Isaac Julien discuss his lyrical films and video art with Tate Director Maria Balshaw, followed by a Q&A session.