Installation view with three large video projections in a dark room. The first still image of a projection shows half of a young black woman's face in close-up. The second projection depicts falling water and the third shows a black woman in rear view in a white, off-the-shoulder, close-fitting dress in a desert area with mud buildings. Isaac Julien, Sammlung Goetz Munich

Sammlung Goetz | Kino der Kunst

Isaac Julien

April 23 – April 27, 2013

A still-life of an exquisite landscape, opulent interiors, dancing bodies – with Isaac Julien, a painterly eye accompanies even the most difficult themes. His films beguile the senses and tickle the gray cells at the same time. They are fascinatingly formal compositions, constructed at the edge of the abyss of reality. Julien is the aesthete among today's artists: Every film-still is a painting; every body a sculpture; every movement a dance step. The most important leitmotifs for Isaac Julien – born in London of parents from the Caribbean – are thinly veiled behind the perfection of his filmed tableaux: migration and identity, civilization and colonialism, the confrontation between poor and rich, yesterday and today, mass culture and art history. This is cinema from an artist who films with the eye of a painter.

KINO DER KUNST presents a comprehensive retrospective with feature films, multi-channel works and full-length documentaries. Cinema 1 of the HFF Munich will show Julien's award-winning film Young Soul Rebels (1991), the docu-fiction Frantz Fanon, White Mask Black Skin (1996), the short films The Attendant (1993), Three (1999) and Baltimore (2003), as well as his homage to deceased film pioneer Derek Jarman, Derek (2008). The Brandhorst Museum will show the six-channel installation WESTERN UNION: Small Boats (2007), which focuses on Sicily and African boat people; Sammlung Goetz will present his reflection on African cinema Fantôme Creole (2005) on four screens.