Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me (Paperback)

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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. 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. 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.

He invites us into a photography studio and in a "Lecture on Pictures” argues for the importance of the new medium in undermining racial stereotypes. The images are beautiful and the message is powerful. This time, there is no conflict between making art and making sense. 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). Isaac Julien (born, London, 1960) constantly pushes the boundaries of filmmaking as an art form. His works tell important stories, prioritising aesthetics, poetry, movement and music as modes of communication. Social justice has been a consistent focus of his films, which explore the medium’s potential to collapse and expand traditional conceptions of history, space and time. 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.

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Tate Britain presents the UK’s first ever survey exhibition celebrating the influential work of British artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien (b. London, 1960). 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 charts 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. 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. 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’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). 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. 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. 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.’

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.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.” 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. A panel including Isaac Julien will explore the main themes of the artist’s exhibition, followed by an audience Q&A. 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.