Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me (Paperback)

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Juilian’s piece on the Italian modernist architect and designer and the many public buildings she designed for Brazil, Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), is a choreography and dance-focused piece. His tutor encouraged him to think about how Black gay men are stereotyped, and this question indirectly led to Looking for Langston.

His indulgence of that urge leavens the message; it’s an unusual dynamic that has a devastating point.Locke (and Julien) dream of restitution, and of something beyond, conveyed by the work’s lasting image of Locke in crisp tuxedo amid falling snow.

Not infrequently, the viewer encounters the same image, presented at varying angles that are often slightly out of sync with one other. Although, this later work nevertheless reflects a visual richness that continues to be the hallmark of Julien’s practice. Stretching out in all directions via short hallways are the individual screening rooms for the films. They include a group of early works from the 1980s, screened on monitors and walls outside the exhibition, and seven multiscreen films in darkened theatres within. Both female entities are mystical beings interrupting or augmenting the biographical and historical narratives that the filmmaker weaves in his elaborate and operatic cinematographic assemblages.

Despite an impressive career spanning forty years, Isaac Julien: What Freedom is to Me, now on view at Tate Britain, is the first large-scale solo show for the film and video artist. Although Julien is a prolific artist, What Freedom is to Me is a poignant reminder of the relative infrequency with which his work is brought to wider attention.

Julien’s fast and loose playing with time opens up this mourning to be a doorway onward, toward the joy and beauty and dancing of resistance, and freedom. In the wider perspective of the exhibition, the early works are sidelined in favor of a selection of his more finished and cinematographic work ranging from 1989 to the present.

In a supplementary screening area outside the main cinematic rooms, one is reminded of what a bold and original artist Julien is in the presentation of seldom seen early works, including Who Killed Colin Roach (1983), made while Julien was still an art student. The photography and films at the Tate are amazing to see individually while powerful when viewed collectively. The abolitionist and freedom fighter Frederick Douglass, played by Ray Fearon, gives a visionary lecture to an audience of Edinburgh Victorians, two of whom are moved to make their own protest in crinolines, while his second wife sits stitching a blue coat for him and his (abandoned) first wife sits pensively for a daguerreotype: the shadow of her existence caught on camera.