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UCSC at LACMA: Isaac Julien Symposium

LACMA Julien IJ
Saturday, May 18, 2019 - 9:00am to 5:00pm
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Presented by: 
Arts Division

A day-long symposium featuring screenings and panel discussions including members of the Arts faculty including Jennifer González, Isaac Julien, Mark Nash, and B. Ruby Rich. Free event; tickets are required. See link below.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Isaac Julien: Playtime, in a collaboration between UC Santa Cruz and the Los Angeles County Museum, LACMA presents a weekend symposium looking at Julien’s oeuvre. LACMA will host screenings, talks, and panel discussions with historians, scholars, and artists responding to four additional important films by Julien.

The symposium will explore a variety of perspectives on these topics and others in Julien’s work, and ways to understand his practice in the contexts of contemporary art, cinema, and theory.

Over the last 30 years, Isaac Julien CBE RA (United Kingdom, b. 1960) has gained acclaim for his cinematic interrogations on the politics of blackness, queerness, gender roles, and the remnants of how colonial pasts inform contemporary society. A founding member of the 1980s experimental film collective Sankofa, Julien politicizes the sumptuous aesthetic of Hollywood films by utilizing the concept of an “aesthetic of reparation.” Rather than represent the plights of marginalized communities in a traditionally naturalistic or ethnographic style, he uses the tools of Hollywood, the art market, and the “politics of the image” to elevate the representation of groups from multiple diverse perspectives and backgrounds.

image information:

Isaac Julien
ECLIPSE (Playtime), 2013
Endura Ultra Photograph
70.87 x 106.3 inches or 62.99 x 94.49 inches
180 x 270 cm or 160 x 240 cm
Photo courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures New York