Looking for Freedom, Isaac Julien Comes Home
Freedom ripples as an undercurrent through the works of the British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien. For four decades, he has produced boundary-stretching works addressing racism, homophobia, migration and colonialism, from experimental documentaries to lavish multiscreen installations; in all of them an activist spirit is counterbalanced with opulent imagery and sound.
Some critics have found Julien’s films too beautiful for the fraught subjects they treat, and like the work of many of his Black peers in Britain who came to prominence in the 1980s, his aesthetic innovations were long overlooked by the art establishment there, which preferred to view his work through a reductive lens of identity.
Now, a major exhibition at Tate Britain, in London, is the culmination of a trajectory that began on the margins, with films for television and cinema, and evolved into something more elaborate that belongs in a gallery setting.
The show, called “What Freedom Is to Me” and running through Aug. 20, is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work ever staged in his home country.
