Originally published in The Voice of San Francisco in April 2025
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present Isaac Julien: I Dream a World. This will be the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a US museum setting, and the largest exhibition focusing on Julien’s film and video installation works to date.
Isaac Julien’s art breaks down barriers between art forms, history and personal identity in his immersive multichannel film and video installations. Distinguished by their compelling fusion of fact and fiction, social critique, and aesthetic immersion, Julien’s works reshape cultural events with a poetic sensibility.
Folding the Past into the Present
I Dream a World features 10 major video installations made across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Americas between 1999 and 2022 plus early films. Julien’s multiscreen installations are influenced by film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture. Whether cornering historical moments such as the first American –led expedition to reach the North Pole in 1908-09, or the migration of North African refugees across the Mediterranean Sea, Julien’s subjects are never locked in one time or place. Creating a time jump, or making the viewer “unstuck” in time has many implications. The mind is essentially a pattern recognition generator. It’s easier to perceive time as linear as a means to organize our world. Julien turns this natural tendency upside down, and by creating nonlinear narratives, he encourages the audience to shift identities from a traditional model of history and storytelling to a visceral experience of time.
“Favoring nonlinear narrative techniques such as reiteration, reflection, and transposition in his orchestration of images and sounds across multiple screens, Julien folds the past onto the present and the present onto the past. In each work, Julien weaves different temporalities, ideas, and imaginations into substantiations of a multi-dimensional selfhood that is not merely in, but of this world. In doing so he allows history and memory to emerge as intimate and desirous visions of a way of being,” remarked Claudia Schmuckli, organizing curator and Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts Museums.
Themes
Lessons of the Hour (2019) (28’46”), a 10-screen film installation, is an immersive and poetic portrait of the orator, philosopher, intellectual and self-liberated freedom fighter Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). Born into slavery in Maryland, USA, Douglass campaigned against slavery and for freedom and social justice. As the most photographed American of his era, he had a keen understanding of how technology could influence human relations. This approach to visual culture anticipated Walter Benjamin’s idea of the reproducibility of images and the loss of their aura, an idea that gained him international attention as an artist and cultural theorist. In Lessons of the Hour, filmed at sites in London, Edinburgh and Douglass’ home in Washington D.C., the character interacts with other cultural icons of his time, and features prominently with his wife Anna Murray Douglass who was responsible for helping Douglass achieve his freedom. Footage from these historic locations in the present day merge with stories from the past to add dimension to the message.
Looking for Langston (1989) (46’29”), filmed in black and white, is a lyrical exploration of the private world of poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes and his fellow Black artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s. Considered a landmark in the exploration of artistic expression, the nature of desire, and the reciprocity of the gaze, Looking for Langston became the hallmark of what American scholar and film critic B. Ruby Rich termed New Queer Cinema. Set in the jazz world of the 1920’s, Julien shot the film in the 1980’s in London using low-key lighting and sculptural smoke. Julien closely referenced the photographs of James Van der Zee, George Platt Lynes and Robert Mapplethorpe, linking 1930’s black-and-white African American photography with 1980’s British Queer cultures.
History and fantasy combine with multi-layered visuals turning moments into constellations. The images and sounds produce novel ideas, but also the space for them to breathe. This reimagination of history blended with the contemporary is what Isaac Julien, quoting bell hooks, often refers to as “diasporic dream spaces.” Engaging with these spaces invites the public to embrace their own creativity and Dream a World of their own.