Isaac Julien

Against the Tides of Globalization

Acclaimed British filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien turns primarily to visually elaborate and technologically sophisticated installations of the moving image to express his urgent fascination with global human movement. Columbia University’s recent World Leaders Forum teamed up with the Mellon Visiting Artist & Thinkers Program to host a talk by Isaac Julien with Carol Becker, Dean of Faculty of the School of the Arts. Dean Becker highlighted this unique choice of featuring an artist for the World Leaders Forum – proclaiming that geopolitically-minded and creative innovators, such as Julien, are particularly significant cultural leaders today.

“Geopoetic,” however, is how Julien seeks to define his artistic work and vision. Throughout the talk, Julien described his evolving expression through the moving image as a new global visual language: a layered technique through which to experiment with representations of cultural change and “otherness.” The audience experienced this first-hand through segmented screenings of WESTERN UNION: Small Boats (2007) and Julien’s most recent and ambitious work, Ten Thousand Waves (2010). As best conveyed in the latter, composed of 9 unique screens, the guise of a coherent spatial conception of global movement is challenged to introduce new political and creative spaces and their diverse methods of traversal.

Both films comprise a symbolic crossroads of borders, cultures, and identities through an exploration of individual and global movement. In each work the motifs of water, boats, and boundaries serve as perpetual historical references to the transatlantic trade of bodies and cultures, framing globalization as both the possibility for, and denial of, mobility. Whether their subjects are floating, swimming, or drowning, they are constantly moving and changing with the poetic and politically charged tides of multimedia visual expression. “My practice has been an attempt at the visual archaeological expedition in transatlantic space and culture of diaspora,” Julien stated, “In effect a traveling cinema which moves against the tides of globalization.”

Julien’s WESTERN UNION: Small Boats presents the viewer with three screens on which multiple voyages of global communications are projected. The piece begins with a gated archway on all screens: in the center we find the elegant silhouette of actress Vanessa Myrie, gazing out at sea through an open gate where she is symbolically, and visually, free.
It progresses with overlapping and recurring imagery from sea to shore; grand Italian Palazzo to stark Baroque stairwell. All juxtapositions suggest fantasies of creolization: cultural entanglement and transculturation. Although a fantastic visual interpretation of global human movement, WESTERN UNION was inspired by the real experiences of contemporary Libyan economic migrants seeking refuge in Europe. Yet, jumping from these tangible points of reference, Julien exploits his bank of loaded images to create an inventive space of imaginary figures, statically autonomous yet powerfully bound by an ambiguous, romantic anti-narrative.

The most anticipated highlight of the event, however, was a screening of the beginning of Ten Thousand Waves, which in its museum installation format takes viewers on a complex and sensory 49-minute journey through 9 video projections, thrusting us into dreams of travel and back to the reality of death. The video presented at Columbia laid all 9 screens into a single flat projection, introducing a completely new perspective and invoking probing questions regarding how art is documented and re-presented. The narrative content of overseas Chinese migration is contextualized by Julien’s initial incorporation of archival footage from the 2004 search over Morecambe Bay, England, where 23 illegal Chinese cockle-pickers were caught by the rising tide and drowned. Julien’s reference to these migrants comprises one of the three general thematic sections throughout the video.

By exploring current political and cultural transportation through one of the most sophisticated film technology and complicated projection installation of its kind in the art world, Ten Thousand Waves frames globalization as both an individual translation and collective transference of how we move and communicate in a cultural time-space continuum. A powerful segment that aptly communicates Julien’s activation of a displaced filmic narrative includes the transition from three young, dreaming cockle pickers in a lush and ethereal clearing to the flying water goddess Mazu, upheld by studio wires in front of a vivid green screen. Mazu (played by legendary film star Maggie Cheung) serves as an inspiring and ominous presence of global mobility and fantasy throughout the work, connecting the past with the present. The dislocation from a romantic scene to a distinctly technological one, however, manifests a deconstruction of cinematic chimera through the revelation of a choreographed, technical reality. The young migrants’ dreams appear ultimately impossible and imposed outside of Julien’s abstract world.

Whether perceived as belonging to a site of urban modernity, cinematic performance, or loaded waters, Julien’s subjects embody mobility through their traversal of each physical projection and its projected world. The view-in-motion experience of his multiple-screen work makes it impossible to have a single point of view or see every screen at the same time and in the same perspective. As Dean Carol Becker reflected upon the experience of Ten Thousand Waves in person, she explained that viewers first search for the “perfect place” to view the composition of screens, only to realize that there is no singular vantage point, no correct perspective. And it is the same with our increasingly inter-connected world today: there is an endless array of ways to look, move, and belong within our contemporary global landscape.  It is thus through Julien’s constructed installation of sight and non-sight–where moving images physically and emotionally move people–that the artist transforms the exhibitionary realm into one of mobilized participation rather than stagnant reflection.

Julien’s stylistic multimedia art tends to offer these nuanced layers of meanings through lush aesthetics and dramatic narratives. In fact, it is often in response to this sensuous expression of diasporic struggle that Julien receives criticism for sacrificing ethics for the sake of aesthetics. However, he argues that there is a significant difference between frivolous romanticizing and creative framing of real-life struggle. Through the use of seductive imagery and stimulating exhibition strategies, Julien demands that attention be given to difficult and obscure topics, such as racial ignorance and African migration. By visually and emotionally appealing to his viewers, Julien ultimately inspires in them a sense of intimate and relevant responsibility toward what they see.

After reflecting upon the trajectory of Julien’s oeuvre (from earlier films exploring queer and postcolonial studies to later work generated by globalization and pushing the boundaries of multimedia installation), a clear parallel to the evolution of technology reveals itself. These mutations and reiterations of technical approaches, Julien explained, make new artistic interventions and conceptual interrogations possible. Given this exciting and palpable evolution of his work, I was inspired to ask: what can we expect next from the artist’s unique filmic visual communication? Julien answered with musings on exploring with documentation and archiving and, even more intriguingly, 3D. As Isaac Julien mentioned earlier in the talk, he not only intends to reflect upon the past, moving “downstream: against the tides of globalization,” but also, hopefully, upstream: pushing and progressing forward.