Migration tragedies in focus as Tate Britain features film-maker Sir Isaac Julien
By James Brewer
With deeply tragic migration endeavours at the top of the news agenda again, the UK’s first retrospective exhibition of influential video and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien is timely. Tate Britain charts the London-born artist’s pioneering work over four decades with the survey taking its title from the words of activist and singer Nina Simone: I’ll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear.
An abundance of creativity flows through the exhibition, illustrating Julien’s experimentation with the moving image, and exacting standards. With other London art students, he was a founder in 1983 of a group that helped establish Black independent cinema in Britain. In 2022 he was recognised with a knighthood for services to diversity and inclusion in art.
Large-scale extracts from seven of his films run to a combined length of 3 hours 39 minutes. His latest, entitled Once Again…(Statues Never Die) confronts the arguments over restitution of African artefacts such as the Benin Bronzes. That theme is ever topical, but two of his earlier works have special resonance in summer 2023.
The Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, when 23 Chinese cockle-pickers drowned off the coast of the English resort, led Julien to make Ten Thousand Waves, completed in 2010. In this, Julien interweaves heart-breaking news footage including anxious radio calls by police and coastguard officials during the vain search and rescue attempts for the hapless group, with the legend of Mazu the Sea Goddess, protector of seafarers. The story of the goddess stems from Fujian province, from where the victims originated. Scenes switch to Guangxi province to where the cockle-pickers’ spirits supposedly journey “from shore to shore,” from England to the Middle Kingdom, and to the super-modern city of Shanghai. In this way, Ten Thousand Waves alludes to both traditional and contemporary Chinese visual culture. It reflects Julien’s penchant for telling stories that illuminate the human cost of capital, labour, and extraction, probing experiences of desire, loss, and separation.
The production features Chinese artists and performers including actresses Maggie Cheung and Zhao Tao, video artist Yang Fudong, calligrapher Gong Fagen, cinematographer Zha Xiaoshi and poet Wang Ping, whose verse pays tribute to the ‘lost souls’ of those who died at Morecambe. The film’s score fuses Western and Eastern styles, incorporating music and original score by Jah Wobble, the Chinese Dub Orchestra, and the classical composer Maria de Alvear.
Julien had earlier, in 2007, made Western Union: Small Boats when immigration was being ever more hotly debated in the UK and mainland Europe. Focusing on the risky and often fatal journeys of refugees across the Mediterranean, he starkly underlines how borders are used to control the movement of people. Remnants of small craft are seen, washed up on a beach like the lives that are damaged and destroyed by dangerous migrations, and the impacts of the journeys on those who make them and on those who must stay behind are traced. Dance has a central role in the film: choreographer Russell Maliphant created a series of vignettes as a poetic reflection on African migration histories and the effects of trauma.
Julien says that the two films “are kind of sister projects because they are both about people searching for the so-called better life, which of course is why my parents came to England from the Caribbean in the first place.”
Detailing a career that remains as fiercely politically charged as it was 40 years ago the exhibition shows how Julien’s work transcends barriers between artistic disciplines, drawing from film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting, and sculpture. Films are presented in cinematic multi-screen installation and mirrors which makes the narratives hard to follow as it switches from one screen to another, but the emotional pull amid sumptuous imagery is beyond doubt.
The new production, Once Again…(Statues Never Die) takes on the relationship between US businessman and art collector Albert C Barnes and the philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke, known as the Father of the Harlem Renaissance, recalling their dialogue and its impact on their work on behalf of African American causes. Locke, played by actor André Holland, examines ‘exotic’ artefacts and their significance to western museums. The story brings in the recently rediscovered 1970 film You Hide Me by the Ghanaian Nii Kwate Owoo, which argues for the restoration of the bronzes. Included is an excerpt from a 1953 film directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais on the same theme, and which was banned by the French authorities for its anti-colonial stance.
Set in the jazz world of 1920s Harlem, Looking for Langston, which was released at the height of the global AIDS pandemic in 1989, reflects on the life and desires of the African American poet, novelist and playwright Langston Hughes (1902-67). It is described as “a powerful celebration of Black, queer love and a rejection of homophobic rhetoric.”
A five-double-sided-screen set-up is used for the installation Lessons of the Hour from 2019, a celebration of the abolitionist and freedom-fighter Frederick Douglass, who spent 1845 to 1847 travelling in Scotland, Ireland and England campaigning against slavery. Speeches by Douglass including Lessons of the Hour, What to the Slave is the 4th of July, and Lecture on Pictures are recalled – the last-named lecture asserting that photography, the new invention, had the power to influence human relations and connections, and help freed slaves to shape their identity.
The 2019 film, Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement, honours the work and legacy of the Brazilian modernist architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), which Julien believes has yet to be fully acknowledged. It features a performance from Balé Folclórico da Bahia filmed at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia northeast Brazil. In a philosophical reflection which stands up well in the light of the latest astronomy revelations, she wrote: “Linear time is a western invention; time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement, where at any moment points can be chosen and solutions invented without beginning or end.”
The show is curated by Isabella Maidment, curator of contemporary British Art and Nathan Ladd, assistant curator, contemporary British Art, Tate Britain, “in close dialogue with the artist.” Following its presentation at Tate Britain, the exhibition will tour to Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht.
The event is a partnership with Lockton, which describes itself as the world’s largest independent insurance brokerage firm.
Lockton has launched a multi-year partnership with Tate which it says demonstrates shared values and a commitment to supporting Tate’s mission of providing access for all to art.
Captions:
Mazu, Silence (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010 Endura Ultra photograph. © Isaac Julien. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
Isaac Julien. Photo © Theirry Bal.
Freedom/Diasporic Dream-Space No. 1 (Once Again…Statues Never Die), 2022. Inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag © Isaac Julien. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
André Holland plays the critic Alain Locke in Once Again … (Statues Never Die).
Installation view, Once Again… (Statues Never Die), Barnes Foundation, 2022 Photo: Henrik Kam. © Barnes Foundation.
Isaac Julien: What Freedom is to Me is at Tate Britain until August 20, 2023
