...called by The Guardian "one of the 10 best around the world". We'd all be grateful for a pipeline, a channel, a link, from your world into all of this... Truth of the matter is, this is your world too.
Bio:
Isaac Julien is one of Britain's most important and influential installation artists and filmmakers. Julien was born in London in 1960 and studied at St Martins' School of Art from 1980 to 1984. His work draws from and comments on a range of disciplines and practices (film, dance, photography, music, theater, painting, and sculpture) and unites them in dramatic audiovisual film installations, photographic works, and documentary films.
His 1991 film Young Soul Rebels won the Semaine de la Critique Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His 1996 film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, made with curator Mark Nash, won the Pratt and Whitney Canada Grand Prize. Julien has also been the recipient of the McDermott Award from MIT and The Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award (2014) from the San Francisco Film Festival. In 2015 Isaac Julien was the recipient for the Kaino Award for Artistic Excellence. Julien was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 for his works The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), and Vagabondia (2000) and has received wide acclaim for works including Western Union (Small Boats) (2007), Fantôme Afrique (2005), True North (2004) and many others. In 2008 Julien collaborated with Tilda Swinton on a biopic, Derek, about Derek Jarman, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival the same year.
Julien's work has been included in Documenta 11 (2002), the 7th Gwangju Biennial (2008), and the Paris Triennial (2012). In addition, Julien has had various solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago (2013), the MCA San Diego (2012), the Bass Museum, Miami (2010), and the Centre Pompidou (2005) among others. In the winter of 2013-2014 his 2010 installation Ten Thousand Waves was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, projected onto nine double-sided screens in a dynamic arrangement specially conceived for The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium.
Isaac Julien's most recent exhibition at the De Pont Museum was a survey show entitled Riot, which spanned thirty years of his career. For the 56th Venice Biennale, Isaac Julien has collaborated with curator Okwui Enwezor and is directing a series of performances, readings and screenings of Marx's Das Kapital, along with an installation of his homonymous work, KAPITAL (2013). Isaac Julien's latest installation piece, Stones Against Diamonds, will also be premiered during the Biennale in the Rolls Royce Art Programme.
Julien's work is included in the collections of institutions around the globe. In 2013, a monographic survey of his career to date, Riot, was published by MoMA, NY.
Recommend Isaac Julien in order to appear here. Click on the grey crosses visible when logged in. Your photo will appear, with a link back to your page:
These are pathways, originating in the sprawling cultural matrix of Brazil (Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazik, Arab, European, Asian...), integrating cultural matrixes worldwide.
Matrix ground zero is the Recôncavo of Bahia...virtually unknown center of gravity circumscribing Bahia's Bay of All Saints...end of voyage for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history...birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. Many countries are happier than Brazil, but none are more joyous.
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay (they paid).
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced (that's me below left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).