In the closing sequences of Isaac Julien’s film about the great Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi – part of this major survey exhibition of his work at Tate Britain – is a refrain that helps unpack Julien’s engagement with culture, history, politics and fantasy. “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.”
All sorts of aspects of time jostle in this sumptuous filmic collage. It reflects on and partly reenacts the life of a late cultural figure. It witnesses the effect of time on the remarkable spaces she built in Brazil. It captures rhythms in choreographed movements of dancers who respond to Bo Bardi’s buildings. It reflects on her fusion of modernism and historic indigenous traditions. And it includes snippets of archival film of the 1964 coup that brought about the Brazilian dictatorship against which Bo Bardi somehow created her architectural masterpieces.
Time is crucial, too, in how we navigate the exhibition. Its 11 films range from four to 49 minutes in length. I was here for close to four hours and could have spent longer. Outside the main part of the show are several of Julien’s earliest pieces, made with the Black British film collective Sankofa, which reflect the development of Julien’s language from documentary into experimental montage.
Among them are his first two films, Who Killed Colin Roach (1983), about the 1982 death of the black 21-year-old man Colin Roach at Stoke Newington police station and its aftermath, and Territories (1984), an impressionistic but activist reflection on the Notting Hill Carnival. When I saw them, the sound of these works was rather competing in this acoustically tricky lobby space – a pity, because it rather interrupts a stirring opening salvo.
From there, we move into his latest: Once Again… (Statues Never Die), made last year. But after that, Julien and the architect David Adjaye have designed the show so that you choose your journey through it. There are natty mini video screens outside each room that tell you how close each piece is to its beginning and end.
Julien is unafraid to be spectacular, lushly beautiful, even extravagant, but always with the sucker punch of his critical eye and political subject matter. In Vagabondia (2000) a black conservator and writhing dancer navigate the interiors of Sir John Soane’s Museum, in a dreamlike questioning of the Enlightenment principles and colonial structures that underpinned the assembling of that remarkable collection.
Lessons of the Hour is in part a costume drama, where Frederick Douglass, the great 19th-century US abolitionist, who was once enslaved, haunts the Scottish landscape and the present-day Royal Academy, where he delivers excerpts from some of his excoriating speeches, as powerful and relevant as ever in today’s political climate.
Only in Ten Thousand Waves (2010) does Julien’s aim to “utilise fantasy to make political statements”, as he puts it, miss its mark. He uses contemporary imagery of China alongside the ghostly presence of the mythical goddess Mazu to reflect on the tragic deaths of 23 Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004. Where elsewhere his poetic allusions never lose sight of their subject, here they feel oblique and unfocused.
But in Once Again… (Statues Never Die), Julien reaches new heights. He even directly quotes from his first great film (also in the show), Looking for Langston (1989), a lyrical paean to the poet Langston Hughes via 1980s London. Once Again…, a five-screen installation with mirrored walls and embedded sculptures, focuses on Hughes’s Harlem Renaissance peer Alain Locke, writer and curator, and the first black man to be a Rhodes scholar – named for the white supremacist Cecil Rhodes – at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
That museum and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia are among the settings for Julien’s gripping study of contested heritage, African art and modernism, as well as the meeting of art and poetry, and the queer desire so fundamental to Hughes, Locke and their artist peers like Richmond Barthé, and a consistent theme in Julien’s own work.
He includes existing footage of Barthé, moments from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s seminal film Statues Never Die (1953) and Ghanaian film-maker Nii Kwate Owoo’s 1970 footage of African objects in the British Museum, alongside stunning original sequences. Among them is the singer Alice Smith delivering a devastatingly beautiful song against stark jazz chords. “Once again,” she sings, “I defend my open heart.”
Elsewhere Moonlight actor André Holland, playing Locke, stands outside a snowbound Barnes Foundation as he speaks a voiceover. “This is artistic freedom as pure and unsullied as falling snow,” he says. This, then, is what freedom means to Julien, and this sensual, beautiful work is his most marvellous entanglement so far.
