Isaac Julien - Ten Thousand Waves

This presentation lives within the framework of the “Hors-les-murs”programme of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, showcasing holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, thus following the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s mission to mount international projects and reach a broader global audience.

Isaac Julien, originally from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia and a graduate of Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, United Kingdom, was one of the leaders of a movement of English filmmakers in the mid-1980s that used video as an activist medium, a counter-discourse tool in Margaret Thatcher’s England. The Sankofa Film and Video Collective was co-founded by Julien in 1983 and was the exact contemporary of the Black Audio Film Collective, notably comprising artist John Akomfrah. Introducing the perspectives of the Black and Asian diasporas into the cultural debate in England, these artists featured themes explored in cultural studies by social theorists like Stuart Hall. Julien’s 1984 documentary Territories explored the Notting Hill Carnival as a place of experiences related to race, class, and sexuality. In addition to these themes, which would appear regularly in his work, the director became known for his use of various filmed and musical sources that he recycled and remixed to create multifaceted discourse. Music is a key catalyst for reflection in Julien’s creations, like in his 1991 feature film Young Soul Rebels, awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, which examined issues of gender and race through the lens of late-1970s underground music culture.

Né à Londres en 1960 et originaire de Sainte Lucie dans les Caraïbes, Isaac Julien est diplômé de la prestigieuse Saint Martin's School. Il est l’un des chefs de file du mouvement cinématographique du milieu des années 1980 recourant à des vidéos pour porter un contre-discours militant dans l’Angleterre de Margaret Thatcher. En 1983, il cofonde le collectif de cinéastes anglais Sankofa Film and Video Collective, exact contemporain du collectif Black Audio Film Collective, auquel participe notamment l’artiste et cinéaste ghanéen John Akomfrah. Inscrivant le regard des diasporas noires et asiatiques dans le débat culturel en Angleterre, ces artistes mettaient en avant des thèmes chers aux d’études culturelles de sociologues tels que Stuart Hall. Dans son documentaire Territories (1984), Isaac Julien se plonge ainsi dans le Carnaval de Notting Hill qu’il analyse comme un lieu d’expériences suivant des critères de race, de classe sociale et de sexualité. Outre ces thèmes, qui vont devenir une constante dans son œuvre, la pratique d'Isaac Julien se distingue par son utilisation de sources filmées et musicales diverses et variées qu’il recycle et remixe pour créer un discours multiforme. La musique est un catalyseur pivot dans la réflexion créative d’Isaac Julien, à l’image de son long métrage de 1991 Young Soul Rebels, primé au Festival de Cannes, dans lequel il aborde les problématiques du genre et de la race par le biais de la culture musicale underground de la fin des années 1970. 

In the early 1990s, Julien worked mainly in television and music video: he produced a documentary series on the history of the gay and lesbian movement in the United States, and a docufiction about influential anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon. More recently, he released a documentary on blaxploitation in 2002, and a portrait of Derek Jarman in 2008, a filmmaker under whom he served as assistant. At the same time, Julien adapted several of his works to an exhibition format and, using multiple screens and novel sound processing, created a new expressive space, giving way to aesthetically crafted visual and sound forms. Nevertheless, Julien’s themes remain present, like figures of migration and the diaspora represented by shifting sound and imagery.

Ten Thousand Waves (2010) is one of Isaac Julien’s most ambitious installation projects. Displayed across nine screens, the work was created in collaboration with key figures from the Chinese arts world, including award-winning actress Maggie Cheung and videographer Yang Fudong, London musician Jah Wobble, the Chinese Dub Orchestra and composer Maria de Alvear. A veritable polyphony of actors, places and periods, the work is a tribute to Chinese culture, a crossroads of calligraphy, cinema and various mythologies, where the issues of displacement and immigration are central. The artist began this project following the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster: in 2004, 23 undocumented Chinese workers being paid a pittance to harvest cockles on the North coast of England were swept away by a tide. In the film, this drama echoes a 16th-century Chinese legend telling of sailors being rescued by the goddess Mazu. This story, coexisting with nods to 1930s Chinese cinema, is to be understood according to the artist in a much broader metaphorical sense: the tragic fate of the film’s protagonists also evokes the memory of African slaves crossing the Atlantic.