Isaac Julien At Tate Is A Gorgeous Exhibition, Sonic Tapestries That Are Politically Charged

Issac Julien’s work is powerful; it’s also poetic and visually elegant. “Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me,” now showing at Tate Britain in London, speaks of art as culturally and politically potent today as forty years ago when the British artist began showing his films and video installations globally. It reveals a career steeped in cultural activism, rooted in experimentation, and with the conviction that art can and should give a sense of agency in the world.

Born in London in 1960 to parents who had immigrated to the UK from St Lucia, Julien is known internationally for his compelling lyrical films and video art installations. The Tate solo show charts the development of his pioneering work in film and video over four decades from the 1980s through to the present day. This is a stunningly designed exhibition, curated intelligently to be an active one that asks us to partake in the narrative, not to be passive bystanders to history, and to have the agency, to great effect.

The show opens with Julien’s earliest experiments in moving images, produced with Sankofa Film and Video Collective. Founded by Julien in the summer of 1983 with art students Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz and Nadine Marsh-Edwards, this group from across the African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora played a vital role in the establishment of Black independent cinema in the UK.

We leave the Sankofa period to theatrically enter a room wrapped in Julien’s latest film, “Once Again… [Statues Never Die]” (2022) — an immersive three-screen video made for this particular gallery setting. From a clearing of sorts, the viewer is then invited to choose their path as a narrative unfolds based on that decision. The “paths” are corridors with color-coded carpets and with individual sounds and scents to evoke a sense that teases and directs us through. What’s more, at the start of each corridor is a screen indicating where the film is, further tasking us to decide how we wish to view the artwork and in what order and time.

Tate curators Isabella Maidment and Nathan Ladd worked closely with Julien and his long-term friend, the architect David Adjaye to imagine and design the exhibition. “We had to think about how to physically and spatially go about this exhibition,” says Ladd. “Isaac is fascinated by image, sound and space, and from the get-go, we wanted to think about how you, as a visitor, can experience his work, how to create a porous, dynamic exhibition experience for the visitor.”

On show is a selection of key works from Julien’s ground-breaking early films and the kaleidoscopic, sculptural multi-screen installations for which he is known today. Collectively the works draw from film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture. The love for dance is evident in how people move within these films, across them and through time. These are weavings of artistic disciplines, collaged and montaged to fill the imagination. And they are exhilarating to experience.

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.”

Four works from Julien’s Sankofa period have been brought together at Tate Britain. These include his first film, “Who Killed Colin Roach?” (1983), conceived as a response to the unrest following the death of the 21-year-old who died from a gunshot wound inside the entrance of Stoke Newington police station in London that year. Other works on display are “Territories” (1984), which focuses on the Black British experience in the early 1980s, and “This is Not An AIDS Advertisement” (1987), an essential work of LGBTQIA+ history that remains as powerful today.

There is so much to take in. “Looking for Langston” (1989) explores Black and queer desire at a time when few were. It’s a visually arresting piece that combines poetry and image to look at the private world of the artists and writers who were part of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

You can sense Julien’s appreciation and understanding of dance and movement particularly in his three-screen film installation “Western Union: Small Boats” (2007). Here African migration histories and the effects of trauma on humans, buildings and monuments are reflected through a series of fluid, beautifully shot vignettes. Meanwhile, filmed at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia in Brazil, “Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement” (2019) is a gorgeous and humorous film that meditates on the legacy of visionary modernist architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi.

The exhibition also showcases Julien’s critically acclaimed ten-screen film installation “Lessons of the Hour” (2019). A portrait of the life and times of the self-liberated freedom fighter Frederick Douglass, the work almost represents Julien’s forty-year commitment to cultural activism, the politics and poetics of image, and the moral and social influence of picture-making.

The photography and films at Tate exhibition are amazing to see individually while powerful when viewed collectively. “Isaac Julien: What Freedom is to Me” reads a little like a conversation, one that takes place between the artist and his past, between poignant historical narratives, between time, space and culture, and between us, the viewer, and the art.

Maidment notes a passage from “Once Again” that illustrates the show well. The line is narrated by the character playing Alain Locke. He says: “As we mature as artists in the mythical diasporic dream space, the culture of infinite possibility is ready to receive us. This is artistic freedom as pure and as unsullied as the falling snow.”

“Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me” is on until August 20, 2023, at Tate Britain.

See my reviews of: “Grenfell” by artist Steve McQueen at the Serpentine Galleries and “Rites of Passage” at Gagosian London, and interviews with installation artist Leonardo Drew, generative artist Tyler Hobbs, and haute couture designer Iris van Herpen.