Shifting Shadows & Steadfast Souls

Isaac Julien: I Dream a World

de Young

Ongoing – July 13

Anna Murray Douglass and Frederick Douglass (as portrayed by actors)

Maybe you think you understand video art. If you re thinking like a photographer or a director, Isaac Julien is about to blow your mind.

Julien’s 10 video installations are full of shifting images where the screens seem to respond to one another with something approaching sentience. While montage is frequently used as the language of film to communicate things like character, plot and emotion. Julien’s pieces are Video Esperanto. A language that makes sense, but only if you feel your way through it.

Julien’s large-scale video projections get deeper and more complex the further one moves through them. Images, words, sounds, colors and themes reproduce themselves across the multiple screens of Julien’s installation pieces, sending the eye ricocheting around in an effort to take it all in.

His work is a compelling exploration of Black and queer experiences, age, visual culture and the history of otherness, within a historic context and the present moment. In today’s political climate, this show is both urgent and necessary. At a time when overwrought and absurdly illogical denunciations of DEI are used to stifle free thought, I Dream a World shows just why deep contemplation and real empathy are essential to unraveling the thorny questions at the heart of what has been the American promise of the last 249 years.

Over the past 25 years, artist Isaac Julien has developed a singular style of moving-image art. His immersive multichannel video installations blend historical fact, speculative fiction, social critique, and spellbinding visuals. They reflect on political and cultural events that have shaped the lives of individuals around the world – especially those on the margins of society.

Celebrated for his poetic visual narratives, Julien explores power, politics, and personal experience through the lens of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Featuring 10 major video installations made between 1999 and 2022, alongside select early single-channel films including his iconic Looking for Langston (1989), this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a museum setting and his first retrospective in the United States.

The works’ themes range from global migration to the collection and appropriation of African artists and art by Western museums to the celebration of cultural figures who overcame racial oppression. Shot across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Asia, Julien’s works untangle the complex web of post-colonial conditions that has shaped the lives of individuals and societies across the globe.

Art museums frequently pop up in Julien’s wide-ranging montages, including in-depth wanderings through the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. There are references to Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, the major Black silent film Within Our Gates, and the transformational Blaxploitation film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.

I Dream a World is an exhibition that requires large amounts of its audience’s time, and probably multiple trips to the museum. If one were to watch all of the installations back-to-back, it would take about four-and-a-half hours to view them all. These works continue to develop and mature across multiple viewings, cross-germinating. I Dream a World really is a world unto itself – a capacious show, intricate, and an endless bounty of thought-provoking, emotionally rapt moments.

Absorbing, these works teach you how to watch them as you move through the exhibition. Exuberant and overwhelming, Julien’s displays are often structured to be far more than can be seen while standing still. Indeed, two of his pieces Ten Thousand Waves and Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) are arranged in such a way that it’s not physically possible to take everything in from a single vantage point. Yet, these artistic choices do not feel opaque or off-putting. Rather, they assure the viewer that there are multiple points of entry into each piece. Amazingly, Julien’s screens interact, bouncing ideas and images off of one another, moving in sync (and sometimes deliberately not in sync), creating multiple different versions of events as he questions the historical record.

If you are able to return to the de Young repeatedly, or have the capacity to remain there for 270 minutes to watch each video – Mazel tov! If not, below are five videos you might want to choose from for your trip. (Alternatively, branch out on your own and discover some of the other five.)

As you review the videos, you will notice the Julien has given many of the videos more than one title. His intent is to reflect the multi-layered and experimental nature of his filmmaking, particularly his multi-channel video installations. These installations, which he describes as "parallel montage," utilize unexpected sequencing and juxtapositions to create meaning and feeling through the combined visuals. This approach encourages the audience to actively participate in constructing the meaning of the work.

Once Again … Old Statues Never Die

Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) centers a fictional conversation on African art, held between Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a pioneering art collector who promoted inclusive education, and Dr. Alain Locke, a philosopher and art critic who was dubbed the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance.” Following Locke as he wanders the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the five-screen installation contemplates the politics of restitution of looted African objects and the creation of a distinct African American aesthetic.

The Lady of the Lake (Lessons of the Hour)

North Star (Lessons of the Hour) is a tribute to the life and work of visionary African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was born in slavery in 1818. Douglass gained his freedom in 1838, around the same time photography became a widespread mass medium. Photographs were key to his civil rights activism, as he acutely understood the power of images in shaping people’s perceptions of African Americans. Julien’s video installation retraces episodes of Douglass’ life, connecting them to today’s political and social moment.

As heady and intellectual as Julien’s installations may be, they deliver simple beauty and visceral emotion. Lessons of the Hour, traces the life of Frederick Douglass, while the 10 screens envelop a viewer in a mosaic of a Virginia forest turning gold during Fall. Julien pierces that serenity with a shot of two hanging Black feet from Within Our Gates, the historically significant film which portrays racial violence under white supremacy, and the lynching of Black people. It is the oldest known surviving film by an African-American director and has been named as one of the greatest films of all time by a Black director.

Ten Thousand Waves

Ten Thousand Waves confronts the February 2004 tragedy of Morecambe Bay, in northwest England, where 23 undocumented Chinese migrants drowned while illegally harvesting cockles. The victims were illegally smuggled Chinese immigrants, brought via Liverpool by criminal gangmasters, and forced to work in highly dangerous conditions, scavenging for shellfish. (Another 15 laborers were able to return to shore, to tell their story.) During the investigation and trial, it emerged that the laborers were inexperienced, spoke little or no English and were unfamiliar with the area. The Chinese gangmaster who organized the trip and two associates of his were found guilty of manslaughter, of breaking immigration laws and other crimes, and were sentenced to several years in prison. David Anthony Eden Sr. and David Anthony Eden Jr., from Prenton, Merseyside, who bought the cockles from the work gang, were cleared of all charges.

Spread across nine screens, and split between different places and times, the film provides a kaleidoscopic understanding of the disaster. The opening scene provides a haunting account of the tragedy, through archival images and sound recordings. The multiple screens allow for a visual exploration of China’s many sides. Archival footage of the country’s communist era is contrasted with bustling views of Shanghai today and picturesque shots of the Fujian province, the homeland of the cockle pickers.

Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves will be on view in Wilsey Court — one of the de Young’s free public spaces.

True North

True North is a meditation on the role and recognition of Matthew Henson, the Black explorer who joined Robert Peary on a 1909 Arctic expedition. Matthew Henson is widely recognized as the first African American to reach the North Pole, along with Peary and four Inuit assistants, on April 6, 1909. While the exact order of arrival is disputed, it's generally accepted that Henson was either the first or among the first to plant the American flag at the pole.

Henson’s participation was seemingly erased from history – along with that of the Inuit guides – until he published his own account of the expedition. Later, his information was included in US Dept of Defense History. At the time of my writing (30 April 2025), the information currently remains on the National Archives.gov website.

This video installation aims to unsettle dominant historical views – nationalist, masculinist, colonial, and scientific. It reimagines an Arctic where Black and Indigenous presences are reinstated.

Looking for Langston

Looking for Langston is an imaginative and lyrical return to the Harlem Renaissance, the golden age of African American arts and culture centered in 1920s Harlem, New York. An expressive exploration of the private world of poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) and his fellow black artists and writers who formed the Harlem Renaissance.

Set in the 1990s during the AIDS crisis, the film features the words and voices of Black queer poets Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Essex Hemphill. Layering images with poetic texts, a signature practice in Julien’s work, Looking for Langston is a hallmark of what film critic B. Ruby Rich termed New Queer Cinema. It is an opportunity to ponder questions of identity, power, and desire in the Black gay community. The work examines to Black gay desire, AIDS and questions of discrimination, and how, as Julien says, “these questions return to haunt the present.”

For more information on this exhibition, click here.

My thanks to Veronica Esposito / KQED Arts