Isaac Julien | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 21 February 1960 |
| Education | Saint Martins School of Art |
| Occupation(s) | Installation artist and filmmaker |
| Employer(s) | UC Santa Cruz Goldsmiths, University of London |
| Known for | Looking for Langston (1989) |
| Website | isaacjulien |
Sir Isaac Julien CBE RA (born 21 February 1960 [1] ) is a British installation artist, filmmaker, [2] and Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. [3]
Julien was born in the East End of London, one of the five children of his parents, who had migrated to Britain from St Lucia. [1] He graduated in 1985 from Saint Martin's School of Art, where he studied painting and fine art film. He co-founded Sankofa Film and Video Collective in 1983, [1] and was a founding member of Normal Films in 1991. [4]
In 1980, Julien organized the Sankofa Film and Video Collective [5] with, among others, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, which was "dedicated to developing an independent black film culture in the areas of production, exhibition and audience". He received a BA Honours degree in Fine Art Film and Video from Saint Martins School of Art, London (1984), [4] where he worked alongside artists, film-makers and lecturers Malcolm Le Grice, William Raban, Anna Thew, Tina Keane, Vera Neubauer, and co-students, directors and film-makers Adam Finch, Richard Heslop and Sandra Lahire, and completed his postdoctoral studies at Les entrepreneurs de l'audiovisuel européen, Brussels (1989). [6]
Julien achieved prominence in the film world with his 1989 drama-documentary Looking for Langston , gaining a cult following with this poetic exploration of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. [7] His following grew when his film Young Soul Rebels won the Semaine de la Critique prize for best film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991. [8]
One of the objectives of Julien's work is to break down the barriers that exist between different artistic disciplines, drawing from and commenting on film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture, and uniting these to construct a powerfully visual narrative. Thematically, much of his work directly relates to experiences of black and gay identity (he is himself gay), [2] including issues of class, sexuality, and artistic and cultural history. [9] [10]
Julien is a documentary filmmaker, and his work in this genre includes BaadAsssss Cinema, a film on the history and influence of blaxploitation cinema. [11]
In 2023, the Tate Gallery in London held a major retrospective of his work titled What Freedom Is to Me. [10] [12] [13] The exhibition was set to open at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastrict in March 2024. [14] [15]
The Pérez Art Museum Miami acquired Julien's Ogun’s Return (Once Again... Statues Never Die) (2022) for the museum collection as part of its PAMM Fund for Black Art in 2024. [16] In this same year, Sir Isaac Julien's films were on view at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. [17] [18] The first, a solo presentation and multichannel installation Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass, and the latter, the cinematic installation Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die), a commentary on the life and work of Alain Locke, Harlem Renaissance philosopher, in dialogue with Albert C. Barnes about African art, at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. [19] [20]
Julien cites cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall as an important influence on his filmmaking. Hall narrates a portion of Looking for Langston. Julien involves Hall in his work once more in the 1996 film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask , [21] which tells the story of Frantz Fanon, the theorist and psychiatrist from Martinique. [22] As a member of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Julien made The Passion of Remembrance (1986), "which attempts to deal with the difficulties of constructing a documentary history of black political experience by foregrounding questions of chauvinism and homophobia." [23] In 2007, Julien participated in Performa 07 creating his first evening-length production Cast No Shadow in collaboration with Rusell Maliphant.
Since 2018, Julien has been a member of the Curatorial Advisory Group at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. [24] In 2019, he was a member of the jury that selected Arthur Jafa as winner of the Prince Pierre Foundation's International Contemporary Art Prize. [25] [26]
Julien was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001, and in 2003 he won the Grand Jury Prize at the Kunstfilm Biennale in Cologne for his single-screen version of Baltimore.
Julien was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to the arts [27] and was knighted in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to diversity and inclusion in art. [28] He was elected a Royal Academician in 2017. [29]
Julien lives and works in London, England, and Santa Cruz, California. He works with his partner Mark Nash.
Julien was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Departments of Afro-American and Visual Environmental Studies, and was a visiting seminar leader in the MFA Art Practice programme at the School of Visual Arts, and a visiting professor at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. He was also a research fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and in September 2009 he became a professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. [30]
In 2018, Julien joined UC Santa Cruz, where he is the distinguished professor of the arts. [31]
Julien is a patron of the Live Art Development Agency. [32]
Frantz Omar Fanon was a French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique. His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA contains galleries, a theatre, two cinemas, a bookshop and a bar.
Colin Roy Salmon is an English actor. He is known for playing Charles Robinson in three James Bond films and James "One" Shade in the Resident Evil film series. He has had roles on many television series such as Doctor Who, Merlin, Arrow, and The Musketeers. He also played General Zod on the Syfy series Krypton and provided his voice and likeness as Agent Carson in the PlayStation VR video game Blood & Truth. In 2023, he joined the BBC soap opera EastEnders as George Knight.
BaadAsssss Cinema is a 2002 TV documentary film directed by Isaac Julien. Julien looks at the Blaxploitation era of the 1970s in this hour-long documentary.
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Looking for Langston is a 1989 British black-and-white film, directed by Isaac Julien and produced by Sankofa Film & Video Productions. It combines authentic archival newsreel footage of Harlem in the 1920s with scripted scenes to produce a non-linear impressionistic storyline celebrating black gay identity and desire during the artistic and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York. The film has a runtime of about 42 minutes.
Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became one of the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
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Sankofa Film and Video Collective was founded in 1983 by Isaac Julien, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Nadine Marsh-Edwards and Robert Crusz, who all graduated from various art colleges in London. Supported by the Greater London Council, the British Film Institute and Channel 4, among others, Sankofa was "dedicated to developing an independent black film culture in the areas of production, exhibition and audience". The name and the logo of the collective derive from the Akan word sankofa from Ghana, meaning "return and fetch it", represented figuratively as a bird turning its head back towards its tail, to signify "going back into the past and discovering knowledge that will be of benefit to the people in the future."
Kara Keeling is an American humanities academic. As of 2016 she is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California in the Critical Studies of Cinematic Arts and in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity.
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask is a 1997 docudrama film about the life of the martiniquais psychiatrist and civil rights activist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). The film was directed by Isaac Julien.
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Nadine Marsh-Edwards is a British film producer. She has been described as "a pivotal force in developing a black British cinema".
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