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17/1/2008

Isaac Julien

Galeria Helga de Alvear, Madrid

Western Union: Small Boats is the final part in the trilogy of audiovisual installations opening with True North (2004) and continued with Fantôme Afrique (2005). In these works, Julien addresses and explores the conditioning of geographical origin and the meanings of both physical and spiritual voyage.

While the first work of the trilogy narrates the heroic deeds of one of the first explorers to the Arctic, in turn one of the first black men to reach those latitudes, in his second piece he reflected on post-colonialism by visiting the so-called “film Mecca” of Africa, paying special attention to its particular architecture.

Now, his new work focuses on the life journey of African migrants trying to enter Europe. Deeply moved by the photographs of corpses washed ashore on Spanish beaches, Julien began a process of research that took him from the remote Chinese province of Fujian to the coast of Sicily.

Isaac Julien tells us the story of those migrants (whom Walter Benjamin called “angels”) from an Africa tore by the contradictions of modernism, to a Europe entrenched behind its privileges and its security. Angels therefore that travel from the garden of Eden to the palaces of the Baroque and Enlightenment periods.

Isaac Julien’s audiovisual works are hard to classify and possess an engrossing, unsettling aesthetic. They consist of five-screen projections in which the editing plays a major role, both in the contrast between one scene and the next, as well as in the relationship between the projections shown on each one of the different screens. His filmic language is indebted to pioneers of filmmaking like Eisenstein or Abel Gance, but also to the new European cinema from the 1960s.

Another basic feature in his expression is the epic nature of loaded images, and the encompassing sound. Almost as important as the visual projection, it configures a sublime territory drawing the spectator into a unique experience within today’s art.

The work we are presenting introduces a new linguistic element: the movement of the body. Julien has recently collaborated with the choreographer Russel Maliphant in a number of performances based on his previous works. This experience reveals the import of the movements of the actors-dancers, creating short choreographies or danced passages.

Image, editing, sound and now movement are the four axes around which Isaac Julien develops his language.

Isaac Julien (London, 1960) studied at the Central St Martin’s School of Art and at Les Entrepreneurs de L’Audiovisuel Europeen (EAVE) in Brussels.
He took part at Documenta XI, Kassel, and his list of solo exhibitions includes projects at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2005), MoCA Miami (2005) and IMMA in Dublin (2005).

Galería Helga de Alvear
C/ Doctor Fourquet, 12 28012 Madrid
Opening Hours: 11 am – 2 pm & 4:30 - 8:30 pm

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