Isaac Julien Looks Back (and Forward) in ‘What Freedom Is To Me’

a survey of the British artist’s work that opens today at Tate Britain – has a lot of texture. There’s a cacophony of noise, even before you enter the show, from televisions displaying Julien’s 1987 short work,, about the fatal shooting of a 21-year-old Black man inside a London police station. In the first room, dedicated to the UK debut of a powerful new piece,, distorted mirrors and dimmed lights transfigure fellow visitors into amorphous shapes .

“A lot of the works which I’ve been involved in making over the years are really about trying to create this almost haptic relationship to the image or a feeling,” Julien, 63, tells me in a sunlit room a few floors up, which overlooks the Thames. This exhibition has been designed in partnership with architect David Adjaye, and together, Julien explains, they sought to create “an invitation to become enveloped by the images”.

, which investigates the relationship between American collector of African artefacts Dr. Albert C. Barnes and cultural critic Alain Locke. The installation has an unapologetically academic premise, one which delves into Black queer desire and colonialism, but the dreamy, black-and-white sequences, shot at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, which star’s André Holland as Locke, lock you in.

That’s true, and while Julien’s work is admirably academic, rich in research and singular points of view, it is also possible, when you are watching the snow fall in, that the outside world may disappear for a transcendent moment or two. “That could be a response, and that would be great,” Julien says, a little enigmatically. “That would be a raison d’être, so to speak.”

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