Tate Britain Presents 40-Year Survey of Isaac Julien's Film Work in What Freedom Is to Me

Isaac Julien
Pas de Deux with Roses (Looking for Langston Vintage Series) 1989/2016
Ilford classic silver gelatin fine art paper, mounted on aluminium and framed
58.1 x 74.5 cm
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Isaac Julien is internationally acclaimed for his compelling lyrical films and video art installations. This ambitious solo show charts 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.

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.

The show opens with Julien’s earliest experiments in moving image, produced in the context of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. Founded by Julien in the summer of 1983 together with Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz and Nadine Marsh-Edwards, this group of London art students from across the African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora played a vital role in the establishment of Black independent cinema in Britain. Four works from this period have been brought together at Tate Britain, including Julien’s first film, Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983) — conceived as a response to the unrest following the death of a young man at the entrance to a police station, Territories (1984), which focuses on the Black British experience in the early 80s, and This is Not An AIDS Advertisement (1987), an important work of LGBTQIA+ history that continues to resonate powerfully today. The artist’s pivotal film exploring Black, queer desire — Looking for Langston (1989) — also features, bringing together poetry and image to look at the private world of the Black artists and writers who were part of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

What Freedom Is To Me is on view through August 26th at Tate Britain, Millbank, London

[AUTRE TV] Vanishing Point by Augustin Doublet

Of his six-minute black-and-white short Vanishing Point, French director and writer Augustin Doublet says, “It’s all about creating a maze of memories and fancies out of this endless labyrinth that you find in Brooklyn. I refer to the subway tracks, to the shades...I was trying to get behind the skin of the city, and to explore this kind of dynamic between dream and reality. So to do that, I thought that to make a portrait of an artist, a woman, was the right way to do it. I tend to like to tell stories about women. And so this kind of descent into her own broken relationships, her broken dreams, was dynamic. I think that was the concept behind it. And one could say that there is something about masochism, which has a very strong link with the practice of art... the practice of painting... I think we take inspiration from our scars. I was interested in the remains of the ink, the remains of internal scars, psychological scars... how the trauma manifests itself into shadows of ink."

Vanishing Point paints a darkly stunning portrait of an artist living in Brooklyn. The film is bleak, discordant, smacking with violent urgency—and yet there is, at the same time, a certain fragility, a delicate quietness underneath its rough exterior. Perhaps this is borne out of Doublet’s own experience living in the ever-growing and changing neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn; watching the juxtaposition between the grittier, rougher “low-life reality,” as he calls it, and the burgeoning artist’s community that has begun to emerge in past years.

Since his arrival in New York, Doublet has written, directed and produced several of his own short films. Initially fascinated by the “harshness, dirtiness, and loose eroticism” of the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, he says, “My imagination and my desire are very related to the location and environment I’m in.” Originally from the Belleville area of Paris, Doublet has been living for three years in The Schoolhouse (the interior of which is shown in Vanishing Point), a unique three-story red brick building in Bushwick that has worn multiple hats since its establishment in 1883—it functioned as an elementary school until 1945, when it was sold and used as a manufacturing space; then it was abandoned and finally converted into artists’ living and working spaces in the 1990s. Now, each floor houses an array of creative individuals—musicians, painters, poets, filmmakers and photographers who often collaborate together (Vanishing Point is set to the spoken words of Mariette Papic, a poet and fellow Schoolhouse resident who Doublet commissioned for the project). About New York, he says, “…if you’re able to project yourself, your energy and your ideas on the city and break through the glass, [it] gives you back so much…”

Text by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre

The Shaping of New Visions

Valie Export, Einkreisung (Encirclement) from the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations). 1976.

The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, on view this month at the MOMA in New York, covers the period from 1910 to today, offers a critical reassessment of photography's role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements—with a special emphasis on the medium's relation to Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art—and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as "New Vision" photography bore the obvious influence of "lens-based" and "time-based" works. El Lissitzky best summarized its ethos: "The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary art from April 18 to April 29, 2013.