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Art Art & Books

Isaac Julien trusts ROM with fiercely political video

ISAAC JULIEN at the Royal Ontario -Museum (100 Queen’s Park), to April 23, $17, stu/srs $15.50.  Free screening  of Julien’s Who Killed Colin Roach?, 6 pm February 3 (RSVP). 416-586-8000.


Is the ROM ready to move on after its apology to the Black community for Into The Heart Of Africa? Black British filmmaker Isaac Julien thinks so. 

He’s brought Other Destinies, two three-channel video installations, to the museum: True North, inspired by Matthew Henson, an African American who took part in Robert Peary’s expedi-tions to the North Pole and Western Union: Small Boats, about another kind of expedition, of contemporary Africans crossing the Mediterranean to Europe.

Julien learned of the ROM’s misbegotten 1989 Africa exhibit, which ended up glorifying the Western colonialism it was trying to critique, when he first started talking about showing here. 

“I think it’s fantastic that there’s been a reconciliation process, though it’s perhaps a shame that it took such a long time. But I think we can turn a new page,” he says. 

“Let’s not forget for one moment the whole struggle around questions of Indigeneity and First Nations peo-ples in these lands,” he adds. “Canada still has the Queen of England on its currency, so I think that tells you a lot about the colonial legacy of the whole of Canada.

“Debates with institutions are always complex and sometimes difficult. We have our own issues in Britain with museums, too, and I think all museums have a way of trying to re-articulate themselves. It’s really important, and the ROM is very conscious of that now, which puts it in a vanguard position.”

Julien appreciates the way the ROM has placed his installations in the Roman galleries, so viewers go from ancient Rome to the contemporary Italy of Western Union: Small Boats, in which dancers on a Sicilian beach and in a baroque palazzo interpret the movements of drowned bodies.

True North also fits well into the setting. Historical achievements like polar exploration “are usually recorded in an institution like this. But this work memorializes an achievement made by an explorer who wasn’t really acknowledged.”

Trained as an artist, Julien was an early adopter of multi-screen video. After making documentaries about Langston Hughes and Franz Fanon and the drama Young Soul Rebels in the 80s and 90s, he turned to multi-screen work in 1999, for which he was nominated for the Turner Prize. In recent years much of his work has been in the multi-channel form. 

He inspired Black filmmakers in the UK like John Akomfrah and Steve McQueen who’ve been able to move back and forth from documentary and narrative film to multi-channel video and installation. 

“I felt that it was really important to shift my preoccupations with independent cinema and video art into a museum context, because I thought in the more classical film and television context there was a kind of bankruptcy in terms of political language.”

His multi-layered political language is evident in both pieces. 

In Western Union: Small Boats, the flow of images of dancers and ruined boats lends grace and dignity to those who’ve drowned at sea, and also communicates the migrants’ desperate hope in the face of a world that turns its back on them. Made 10 years ago, the project prophetically focused on an issue that’s only been amplified since then. 

Julien uses a similar poetic licence in 2004’s True North, undercutting the traditionally masculine face of polar exploration by depicting Henson as a Black woman who wanders a landscape of snow and ice, sometimes accompanied by two Inuit men. Torrents of falling water evoke global-warming-caused melting.

Though there’s no linear narrative, these strong and ambitious works reward us with a richness of imagery and association that’s gripping and dramatic.

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