Isaac Julien show at Tate Britain is like a punch from a velvet glove
When the Tate Modern’s new wing opened in 2016 it promised to usher in a new era in which performance and video would be given equal billing to paint on canvas.
Aside from 2018’s blockbuster Steve McQueen show, this brave new world hasn’t quite materialised, and it seems telling that the biggest, most exciting video exhibition since Covid is hosted not in the bowels of the Tate Modern but in its Millbank-based sibling.
And what an exhibition it is. Black, queer, London-born filmmaker Isaac Julien’s show is utterly sumptuous, a pristine, carpeted, dimly-lit series of installations unlike anything else I’ve seen.
Before you enter the exhibition proper, several of Julien’s early works are beamed onto the foyer wall: a defiantly lusty response to the Aids crisis; footage of a protest march through East London following the murder of young black man Colin Roach in the 1980s. It shows real confidence that important works like these are presented as a kind of primer for what’s to come.
Then you enter into a sea of grey, whitewashed gallery walls replaced by mirrored fabric and bouncy carpets. Julien’s latest film, Once Again… (Statues Never Die) plays across five screens that cleave apart the space. Filmed in crisp black and white, it’s strikingly beautiful, not least the front-of-the-brochure shot of snow rising from the shoulders of its star André Holland.
The 30 minute film examines the way African art has been othered and downplayed by western galleries, told from the point of view of writer and curator Alain Locke. A devastating solo by singer Alice Smith is worth the price of admission alone.
From here you pass into an innovative hub-and-spoke layout designed by architect David Adjaye, in which a series of films play in rooms off a central atrium. There’s a costume drama based on the life of anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass, told across 10 screens; a haunting rumination on the 2004 Morecambe Bay tragedy featuring Crouching Tiger-style wire acrobatics; a film about the work of Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi; a surreal, choreographed comedy of errors looking at the way we accumulate and interact with art.
The pieces are compellingly disparate, tied together only by the themes of inequality and identity central to Julien’s work and the striking visual poetry with which he tells his stories. There is no lack of force to these films, but each punch is delivered by a fist wrapped in a velvet glove.
To think of these installations as drop-in, drop out pieces (an honest mistake for gallery-goers more used to looped video art designed to be seen in a non-chronological way) would be a mistake.
Instead think of this as an afternoon at the cinema, with each film to be luxuriated in from start to finish. In total there’s over four hour’s worth to digest, and you’ll want to set aside time to rewatch your favourites.