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). 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. Arts Upskirting, the Moulin Rouge, psychedelia: Impressionists on Paper paints the artists as rebels Read More

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 significant

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

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. 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. Best modern and contemporary art platform featuring artworks by international artists. Exhibit, sell, buy, create and discover incredible creativity in painting, illustration, design, sculpture, drawing, photography, 3d, fashion and more. The exhibition is being developed in cooperation with Tate Britain, London, where it will be on view from April 27 to August 20, 2023. 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).

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

Ihre E-Mail Adresse ist nicht valide.

A fundamental aspect of the work, is that the museum is a ‘private home staged as a museum’ which centres the question of what ‘home’ is for all the artefacts that it contains. In having his own mother, Rosemary, narrate the film in a French Creole dialect which originates in Saint Lucia, a sense of displacement infuses the experience of the film. 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.

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. That’s true, and while Julien’s work is admirably academic, rich in research and singular points of view, it is also possible, when you are watching the snow fall in Once Again… (Statues Never Die) or the calligraphy strokes in Ten Thousand Waves, that the outside world may disappear for a transcendent moment or two. “That could be a response, and that would be great,” Julien says, a little enigmatically. “That would be a raison d’être, so to speak.” 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.’ For me the revelation here is Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), an homage to the Italian-born Brazilian architect, in which her words are spoken by actresses of two different generations, and her spaces and structures animated by dancers. 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.

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. 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 (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.