Biographie

A 1984 graduate of St. Martin's School of Art in London, where he studied painting and fine art film, Isaac Julien was one of the co-founders of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, created with support from Channel 4. This group of young Black filmmakers set out to examine how the perception of Black identity was constructed, an issue which lies at the heart of Julien's work. In 1991 he and Marc Nash founded Normal Films, a production company for minority films and experimental cinema. Among his early films were Looking for Langston (1989), Young Soul Rebels (1991), which received the critics prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and the documentary Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (1996).
'If one traces the genealogy of Isaac Julien's films and the theory, one soon finds the thread that links all his visual works and runs through all his writings: the critical analysis of black identity, which affirms itself thanks to a rigorous aesthetic thinking. The matrix common to his films starts from colonial and postcolonial history, from black popular film and musical culture, and from multiple literary, philosophical, psychoanalytical and artistic references, which all bear on issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality and class. The integration of numerous archive documents, both written and visual, linked to the African diaspora and to modern globalization indicates a sustained intellectual engagement and a continual reflection on reality in its relation to past, present and future. His very method of working, often juxtaposing practice and theory, is to reunite these references within the framework of an artistic project, which articulates the paradigms that compose a black identity linked to its memories within a spatial and cinematic construction.'[1]
In 2001 Julien was awarded the Turner Prize from the Tate Britain for his films The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999, in collaboration with Javier de Frutos) and Vagabondia (2000). The same year, he received MIT's Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts and in 2003 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Kunstfilm Biennale in Cologne for the single-screen version of his video installation Baltimore. He has also been a research fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and taught in the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard University.
Translation Miriam Rosen


[1] . Elvan Zabunyan, 'Blackness et créolisation de Langston Hughes à Derek Walcott en passant par Fanon,' Isaac Julien (Paris : Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2005), p. 8.