Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me (Paperback)

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He says: “As we mature as artists in the mythical diasporic dream space, the culture of infinite possibility is ready to receive us. A Regency dandy dances through the convoluted spaces of Sir John Soane’s Museum, apparently observed only by a black curator (the voiceover is in Creole, as if Julien did not want you to comprehend). Featuring strikingly beautiful reproductions of these extraordinarily powerful works, this publication enriches our understanding and appreciation of a remarkable artist.

The irony of critiquing institutions and examining the potential dangers of the fetishisation and misappropriation of African artworks in an exhibition at the Tate Britain was not lost on me. While earlier films focus on serving the visuals, the work gathers power as we near the present day. Two actors play the architect at different stages of her life and voice texts inspired by the architect’s writings.The film, which features an early credit for Sophie Okonedo, is an exuberant joy, and arguably a landmark for Black queer cinema. He has said of “Looking for Langston,” an iconic piece from 1989, “Before I was looking, I was listening. Even though I go on to make other works, which perhaps are concerned with different themes […] connected to art and modernism, or migration movements, or the museum itself, they’re still connected to these kinds of early works which, for me, have become foundational,’ Julien explains. Though it’s not featured in the exhibition, I mention Julien’s 1991 feature film Young Soul Rebels, which is being rereleased in cinemas this week.

We went back to the out-takes and found elements that we could suture back together, bringing the Alain Locke character back to life in a different kind of way. Looking for Langston incorporates footage of the opening of an exhibition at the Harmon Foundation, New York, of work by African American artists, including Lois Mailou Jones (1905–98), which was attended by such illustrious figures as Palmer Hayden and James A. 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.Celebrated for his compelling lyrical films and his video art installations, Isaac Julien is one of the leading artists working in film and video today. This is almost as tendentious as the stylised sequences in Julien’s 2007 Western Union: Small Boats, where dancers were actually choreographed to play immigrants drowning during fatal Mediterranean crossings. This chronology – which sits opposite one of the earliest works in the show, Territories (1984), and This is Not an AIDS Advertisement (1987) – serves as a baseline for the exhibition, in which we see Julien’s work address these same issues as his practice evolves. So the starting and ending of the exhibition with these early works reminds us of the origins of his practice and of the socio-political context in which it was forged.

Acclaimed as the first art film made about the historical condition of being both black and gay, this cult work glitters on continuous loop at the heart of the show, and if you start here something particular starts to emerge. What links both films within the exhibition is the notion of representing architecture on screen and in this it is, I think, singularly unique. He even directly quotes from his first great film (also in the show), Looking for Langston (1989), a lyrical paean to the poet Langston Hughes via 1980s London. The sound of rotor blades and the pilot’s dryly pragmatic commentary are juxtaposed with figures from Chinese myth and history.

A lot of the works which I’ve been involved in making over the years are really about trying to create this almost haptic relationship to the image or a feeling,” Julien, 63, tells me in a sunlit room a few floors up, which overlooks the Thames. Elsewhere, dancers spiral round a staircase of architectural interest in Brazil, someone wanders Sir John Soane’s Museum at night, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass encounters the feet of a lynched man hanging from a tree. On two screens, her image is reflected, mirrored: the dichotomy of Julien needing to contend with the museum, and yet fantasizing about its distortion. Where elsewhere his poetic allusions never lose sight of their subject, here they feel oblique and unfocused.