Isaac Julien is one of the most influential artists working in film and video today. Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is the first comprehensive museum presentation of Julien’s work in the United States. Below, the artist speaks about the exhibition, his journey as a filmmaker, and his advice for I Dream a World visitors. 

In your words, can you tell us what this exhibition is about? 

Isaac Julien: It’s about how moving image art can intervene with our received histories of the world and force us to hold the past — and our memories for the future — like a waking dream. 

Can you tell us a bit about your journey as an artist? 

IJ: I have always found imagination to be the best tool for exercising our agency as human subjects. 

In 1981, the year of the riots in Brixton, London, I was a second-year art student at Central Saint Martin’s. I immediately felt the effect that the riots had on my generation across the country — which was to throw us all together in resistance. The expectation was that young artists would therefore either make respondent works or works that could define themselves outside of this frame of reference. I have spent my career imagining a third option: to work against all expectations. 

What drew you to film as a medium? 

IJ: I decided to do fine art/film as my degree in 1980, and that’s when I was introduced to experimental film. I was fascinated by its possibilities as a painterly medium (and therefore the possibilities of making filmic and video artworks that could challenge film’s very definition). I realized that film can be an encapsulation of all other art forms. 

Almost two decades later, with the development of The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), I expanded to working with multiple screens — at the time an entirely new dimension in which to push the boundaries of the medium.

Your work often blends visual art and narrative cinema; how do you balance the two?

IJ: I try to resist linear narrative in my work; even my early single-screen works like Looking for Langston (1989) investigate how the aesthetics of cinema can transgress the normative expectations for film. Moving image is a form of visual art unto itself, but of course one of the great opportunities that it presents an artist is to reference and inflect beyond cinema by reworking its codes. You see this at play in this exhibition with works like Baltimore (2003), which places Melvin Van Peebles beside a Black femme fatale cyborg in a science-fiction reimagining of the Blaxploitation genre that he pioneered. In Ten Thousand Waves (2010), I restaged scenes from the Chinese film The Goddess (1934). And of course Fantôme Afrique (2005) is fundamentally concerned with the cinematic landscape and architecture of Burkina Faso, whose capital city is host to the Cannes Film Festival of Africa — Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO). 

In your multiscreen installations, how do you want viewers to engage with space, time, and movement? 

IJ: We are all mobile spectators, constantly picking and choosing the images with which we surround ourselves. (Of course, nowadays, this process also involves a prescreening of sorts by the ever-changing algorithms of social media.) But one of the advantages of multiscreen moving image installations is the way in which they encourage the viewer to become conscious of this selectivity, and to feel how this informs their internalization of the poetic imaginaries that my works construct. So it is my hope that viewers embrace this opportunity and become aware of how their experience of my work may, perhaps, change their viewing habits in a playful manner as they move through or around the installations.

Your work Lessons of the Hour (2019) was recently acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. What do you hope viewers take away from this work?

IJ: It’s fairly well known that Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man of the 19th century, but his brilliant theories on the politics of visualization that photography deploys — which constitute a foundational contribution to what would become the art history of photography — are too often overlooked. My work Lessons of the Hour reconciles the legacy of Douglass as a photographic subject and scholar of photography with his legendary work as an abolitionist. The salon hang of its 10 screens creates a parallel with the conditions under which visual art was consumed in the 19th century. It is a portrait of Douglass that will leave viewers with a visceral appreciation of his unstoppable activism and sense of aesthetics.

What advice would you give to those trying to create socially engaged art today? 

IJ: Don’t be didactic!