Isaac Julien’s latest work Once Again… (Statues Never Die) is the focus of this exhibition of newly conceived photographic works.
Once Again… (Statues Never Die) is an immersive five-screen installation by artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien. Commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in celebration of its centenary, the work explores the relationship between Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who was an early US collector and exhibitor of African material culture, and the famed philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke, known as the ‘Father of the Harlem Renaissance’.
Aspects of the film are expanded upon in Julien’s new series of photographic works.
This new photographic series is inspired by Isaac Julien’s extensive research into the work and critical writing of Alain Locke (1885–1954), leader of the Harlem Renaissance, and his relationship to Albert C. Barnes, the philanthropist, pioneering art collector and founder of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
The exhibition comprises photographic artworks (all dated 2022) which honour Locke’s contribution to the arts while also inviting critical conversations around the African material culture that influenced the Black cultural movement. The writings of Alain Locke and Albert C. Barnes on the meaning and value of African material culture were reproduced in Harlem Renaissance periodicals of the 1920s including Opportunity, Survey Graphic, and The Crisis.
The motif of weather and the elements of snow and winter permeate this series of photographs. They reference Christina Sharpe’s concept of weather as ‘the totality of our environments’ and bell hooks’ text Winter, in which she writes, ‘we emerge out of the snowy mist, shadowy figures moving into clear light; in clear light… we see one another. One mystery is solved: we are the shadowy figures… looking for the door to transgressive culture that will let us in.’
‘Isaac’s work has been and continues to be an engagement with the power of becoming free – of walking away from received imposed thoughts and images and walking toward ideas, thoughts, and images emerging from a commitment to an artistic aesthetic that requires utter devotion to seeing beauty as the essence of making any art. It is his profound belief that engaging beauty and cultivating our capacity to experience the beautiful is a necessary act of political resistance,’ writes bell hooks in Winter. After her death in December 2021, Julien went back to hooks’ text written for his autobiography Riot and excerpted parts of it for his immersive five-screen moving-image installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die) and dedicated this work to bell.
In Julien’s work, the totality of the artistic environment includes his photographic artworks as well as his moving-image installations, and in the case of Once Again… (Statues Never Die) those atmospheres are created between the political reality of racism and class discrimination, and the use of ‘critical fabulation,’ a speculative storytelling inhabiting what hooks describes as ‘the mystical diasporic dream-space.’
