It is particularly fitting for these two films to be exhibited together, as both share a broad commonality in their probing, out-of-the-ordinary considerations of aspects of the Harlem Renaissance – known in the 1920s and 1930s as the New Negro Movement, after The New Negro (1925), edited by the philosopher Alain Locke – and its associated artists. See my reviews of: “Grenfell” by artist Steve McQueen at the Serpentine Galleries and “ Rites of Passage ” at Gagosian London, and interviews with installation artist Leonardo Drew , generative artist Tyler Hobbs , and haute couture designer Iris van Herpen . The film, with its striking fantasy sequences and poetic choreography, quickly earned a cult following, and plays at this exhibition.

Visitors to the exhibition do not access the exhibition through this main vestibule, but instead through one of the screening rooms, entering through the rear of the space, through what feels like a back door, which is slightly, and I think intentionally, disorientating. Barnes (played by Danny Huston), a collector and exhibitor of African material culture who founded the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in 1922. The first ever large-scale solo exhibition by film and video artist Isaac Julien is currently on view at Tate Britain in London. Celebrated for his compelling lyrical films and his video art installations, Isaac Julien is one of the leading artists working in film and video today.From a clearing of sorts, the viewer is then invited to choose their path as a narrative unfolds based on that decision.

Once inside, the layout conjuncts in the central atrium filled with stills from the films, poetry, sketches and storyboards. The first survey exhibition (23 September 2023–14 January 2024) in Germany dedicated to work of Isaac Julien reveals the breadth of a groundbreaking oeuvre from its emergence in the 1980s to the present. Here is A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), honouring the wild architecture of the Italian modernist Lina Bo Bardi, filmed across seven public buildings she designed for Brazil. For example, the full-grown glowing and smiling queer cherubs in Looking for Langston are avatars of the immortality of subversive gay culture in the face of the constant tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, whose scourge was at its height when Julien made the film in 1989.Isaac is fascinated by image, sound and space, and from the get-go, we wanted to think about how you, as a visitor, can experience his work, how to create a porous, dynamic exhibition experience for the visitor.