[spectre] New podcast: Conversation with artist and film maker Isaac Julien

[Radio Web MACBA]

New podcast: Conversation with artist and film maker Isaac Julien
<https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-306-isaac-julien>

Link: https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-306-isaac-julien

The work of Isaac Julien
<https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-306-isaac-julien> moves through
liminal spaces. Overlapping zones between photography, film, and
installation; choreography and dance; poetry and music… and the infinite
possible versions, iterations, and variations that can emerge from
systematic work with the archive. Intersections in which fiction,
documentary, narrative, and radicality converge to produce aesthetically
meticulous and politically powerful imaginaries and stories that challenge
white heterosexual film conventions through their temporalities, narrative
construction, and aesthetic forms.

The son of Caribbean immigrants, Isaac Julien was born in London in 1960.
He was a key figure in the new wave of black independent film that emerged
in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was in power. He
co-founded the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, which was influenced by
debate on post-colonialism and social theorists such as Homi Bhabha and
Stuart Hall.

In his films and installations, Isaac Julien constructs a personal
imaginary of black history and culture, as well as queer blackness. Through
works like “Looking for Langston” (1989), “Young Soul Rebels” (1991),
“Frantz Fanon: White Skin Black Mask” (1996), and “Lesson of the Hour”
(2019), amongst others, he has developed what he calls an “aesthetics of
reparation”. His work also casts a critical eye on the impact of
globalisation, capital, migrations, and new forms of work in our world
today.

In this podcast, Isaac Julien talks about the need to give a voice and body
to dissident black identity and desire in the cinematic imaginary, as a
means of dismantling the hegemonising whiteness. He also discusses his
constant shifts between the worlds of art, video art, and film, through
expanded cinema, choreographic montage, multiple screens, the movement of
spectators and by breaking the flow of narrative and time. He talks about
his working process based on constant revisions, with and thanks to the
archive. And he confesses his mistrust of the promise of the radical nature
of new technologies, while suggesting other ways of looking, with pleasure
and beauty always at the centre.

Timeline
00:53 Intro
04:25 Analysis of the gaze. Who’s looking? Whose pleasure? Whose beauty?
15:56 Paintings and Super 8. Galleries, museums, films and TV.
21:09 The camera as a weapon. A critical reflection on the digital
revolution.
26:46 Versioning and sharing black public culture. Expanded cinema.
36:23 The liminal space between the still image and the moving image.
43:02 A laissez-faire approach to the work.


*E/N/J/O/Y*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://post.in-mind.de/pipermail/spectre/attachments/20200302/256d9fb0/attachment.html>