Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me (Paperback)

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What links both films within the exhibition is the notion of representing architecture on screen and in this it is, I think, singularly unique. Even with the ability to navigate the museum virtually with its ethereal, again uncanny, 3D scan, you are no closer to genuinely understanding the experience of being in the building.

As Julien explains it: “This gradual increase in scale – from one to two, to three, to five [screens], and so on – has always been in service to ideas and theories: film as sculpture, film and architecture, the dissonance between images, movement, and the mobile spectator.” And therein lies the power of these filmic installations, situated as they are around a particular gallery space, images shifting across screens and all the while spectators moving around the space. The mobile spectator, to use Julien’s own term, is active, engaged and entirely in control of their own journey and experience as they travel though a fluid exhibition space designed by the artist with the architect David Adjaye. Julien has taught extensively, holding posts such as Chair of Global Art at University of Arts London (2014-2016) and Professor of Media Art at Staatliche Hoscschule fur Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany (2008 – 2016). He is the recipient of the James Robert Brudner ‘83 Memorial Prize and Lectures at Yale University (2016). Of all Julien’s films, this was the only one that, for me, rang a false note. The spectacle of dancers pulling children’s sweaters out of the sea, and lying beneath silver hypothermia blankets lined up on the beach as if dead, feels jarring (though would I have found such staged scenes awkward in a feature film? Almost certainly not). In 2018, Julien joined the faculty at the University of California Santa Cruz where he is a distinguished professor of the arts and leads the Moving Image Lab together with Arts Professor Mark Nash. Julien is the recipient of The Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award 2017. Most recently, he was awarded a Kaiserring Goslar Award in 2022, and was granted a knighthood as part of the Queen’s Honours List in 2022. isaacjulien.com Categories Over the past 40 years, Julien has critically interrogated the beauty, pain and contradictions of the world, while inviting new ways of seeing. This exhibition is the largest display of Julien’s work to date, reflecting how his radical approach has developed from the 1980s to the present day. You will encounter films he made as part of Sankofa Film and Video Collective (1982–1992), as well as large-scale, multi-screen installations. Julien says, ‘This gradual increase in scale – from one screen to two, to three, to five, and so on – has always been in service to ideas and theories: film as sculpture, film and architecture, the dissonance between images, movement, and the mobile spectator.’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). 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. 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’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. Fabulous. That was the word which kept springing to mind as I passed through Isaac Julien’s new retrospective at Tate Britain – the largest ever for this artist and filmmaker born in the East End in 1960, who is, seemingly, besotted with elegance. 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 significantIsaac Julien, "Mazu, Silence (Ten Thousand Waves)" (2010) Endura Ultra photograph Isaac Julien. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro 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.

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 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.One 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.