Isaac Julien
Exhibition at Tate Britain, 26 April – 20 August, 2023
Review by Franklin Nelson
A Black man with close-cropped hair and wearing black tie stands erect, the snow falling around him landing on his head and shoulders. We see him even as he refuses our gaze, because he is standing at an angle to us and his eyes are closed. He looks at peace, without fear, free. This image – the first that visitors to Isaac Julien: What Freedom is to me see as they prepare to enter the exhibition at Tate Britain – is taken from the 63-year-old London-born artist’s latest 2022 film, Once Again… (Statues Never Die), but recalls one of his oldest and most celebrated, Looking for Langston (1989), in a nod to how pivotal looking, and looking again, at stories and history has been to his practice.
Running until 20 August, 2023, Julien’s first UK retrospective brings together work from the early 1980s, when he was still at art school, through to last year, when he received a knighthood and the Goslarer Kaiserring award. Not all of Julien’s pieces are here: notable absentees include his debut feature film Young Soul Rebels, which scooped the Critics’ Prize at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, what is here amounts to a thorough, revealing overview of his aesthetic and thematic preoccupations and his modes of storytelling that is well worth seeing.
The exhibition begins at the start, as it were, with three early works from Julien’s time in the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, whose members privileged Black subjectivities. Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983) is a response to the murder of the 21-year-old in a London police station in 1983. The ‘campaign tape’, to quote its maker, intersperses footage of street protests with testimony from relatives of Roach. Behind the old television set on which the film is playing is a collage of black-and-white photographs of demonstrators and police officers, prototypical of the multi-screen installations that have become Julien’s hallmark.
Nearby are Territories (1984), a lush account of the cultural significance of Notting Hill Carnival, and This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement (1987). While the first part of this 10-minute work makes melancholic use of music and water imagery to mark loss, the second part morphs into a pop video as Mark Nash, Julien’s partner and collaborator, urges us to ‘feel no guilt in [our] desire.’ The trio of films may be rough around the edges but it captures the social and cinematographic questions that have continued to interest Julien, and so frames the exhibition well. Its placement in a large foyer that is brightly lit, busy with visitors and lacking seating is, however, a misstep, depriving the work the space that it merits.
From there, we plunge into the show proper: six dark rooms, linked by a central zone, whose films all deliver striking blends of the sonic and the visual, and have a total running time of about four hours. For someone who has consistently played with time and the order of things, it feels apt to start with Julien’s most recent work from 2022, Once Again… (Statues Never Die). Across five screens, Julien revisits the Harlem Renaissance, first explored in the iconic Looking for Langston, but from a different angle. Although scenes and lines from that 1989 film appear, the focus is not the literary movement’s best-known poet, Langston Hughes, but its ‘father’, the writer Alain Locke’s relationship with the art collector Albert C. Barnes, and an examination of the role of museums and processes of restitution.
Now the choice is ours: the ‘fluid exhibition space’ designed by Julien and architect David Adjaye allows visitors to ‘choose [their] own route’ through rooms and become ‘mobile spectator[s]’. This enacts the idea that there is always more than one way of seeing things and, by disrupting a conventional start-to-finish layout, enables the forging of new connections between works. The bleeding of sound from some rooms into others, meanwhile, reminds us that nothing here should be considered in isolation. Where Vagabondia (2000) returns to the museum, incorporating dance to probe the link between the neo-classical architect and collector Sir John Soane and the narratives about the past that go told and untold by the museum space named for him, Western Union: Small Boats (2007) uses dance to home in on the personal dangers and political dynamics of migration. Elsewhere, Julien touchingly treats Black lives and inserts them into wider lineages, notably by referencing James Baldwin in Looking for Langston and having the cultural critic Stuart Hall narrate some of the film.
‘Pictures, like songs, should be left to make their own way into the world,’ says Frederick Douglass towards the end of Lessons of the Hour (2019), a compelling exploration of that African American abolitionist’s use of photography and his links to Edinburgh, which is perhaps the show’s highlight. ‘All they can reasonably ask of us is that we place them on the wall, in the best possible light, and for the rest allow them to speak for themselves.’ Enhanced by a lavishly illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Wole Soyinka and Caleb Azumah Nelson, among others, the Tate’s placement of Julien’s work is, overall, well judged. It also confirms that his work speaks for itself. As insightful as the essays are, the real demand this exhibition makes of us, and therefore its real reward, is that we take the time to look.