Across the watery divide

Isaac Julian – Western Union: Small boats
Two Rooms
19 August – 10 October 2009

This is the third film in Isaac Julian’s trilogy that was started by True North, seen at St. Paul St in 2004 and – in my view - the highlight of the Turbulence Triennial.

The second film Fantome Afrique (2005) never got here, but this last work in the series seems very different. It continues Julian’s interest in extraordinary landscapes and human movement. This time instead of individual explorers it is focused on the plight of refugees who in an attempt to escape deplorable economic hardship try to travel in small, overloaded boats from North Africa to Sicily, often with insufficient fuel or food.

This film though does not have the magnificent viewing conditions of True North – with three screens in a wide room. The Two Rooms venue is disappointingly narrow and like a long corridor, with a couch some distance from a single screen. Too far away to get really drawn into the imagery, as you should.

Small Boats is a sensual treat (what you can see of it, you really have to walk up close) with bleak white hills that seem to be salt, contrasting with the azure of the Mediterranean. Julian has also incorporated lavish interiors of Palazzo Gangi, a chateau used by Visconti to make The Leopard. The work is very studied and over contrived, mainly because of the choreography of Russell Maliphant, with writhing underwater bodies, and figures rolling down ornate staircases. The luxurious house, an excessively paradisical symbol perhaps for the good life the boat people crave, seems to over-complicate the concept of the film – though it provides extraordinary viewing.

In fact the best imagery is very simple, of faded smashed up boats washed onto the beach. They really make the point of the story in a grippingly succinct fashion, hitting home free from any fanciful or mannered conceit. They are the tragic true stars of the film, not the gyrating actors or very still landscape.

Static and moving Julien

Isaac Julien: Te Tonga Tuturu /True South (Apparatus)
Two Rooms
6 March - 4 April 2009

Isaac Julien’s installation True North at St Paul St was for many the highlight of Turbulence, the last Auckland Triennial. It was exceptionally striking with its multiple screens, dramatic polar imagery, post-colonial anti-masculinist themes and remarkable clarity of sound, so this new show of work made during a recent Two Rooms residency, will have created much anticipation.

It uses all the Two Rooms galleries, and includes some moving image and a lot of constructed photographs that refer to their own devising. Pieces of lighting equipment are lying around, and the most of the images have had the forms digitally reconfigured or the colours tweaked - as if he has used a filter.

Many of the themes of True North are in True South, namely that of exploration and dramatic landscape. No snow or ice this time round, but lots of lush sub-tropical vegetation. The sharpness of the blue-green in the glowing light-boxes and much bigger lambda prints really hits you. With panoramic breadth, rich chroma and everywhere a precise acuity, there is little of the blinding, optical dazzle of True North.

Aotearoa’s bush covered landforms are so richly complex compared to the austerity of the flat ‘Arctic’ he constructed for True North that Julien seems utterly enraptured in the source material for his representations, despite the incorporation of equipment used to create ‘natural’ images. In the end his static images are a bit ordinary, particularly to New Zealand eyes - because such scenes are commonplace and his alterations are too subtle. It is with the moving image and editing that his talent shines.

That is why his two screen installation of Dungeness, a super-8 homage to the charismatic innovative film-maker Derek Jarman, is the best thing in the show. It has a lively spontaneity as images of Jarman, his house and garden, and his actress friend Tilda Swinton, jump back and forth between the two screens. It has an appealing rawness that makes you want to see more (it is fresher, shorter and simpler than his full-feature Derek, and seems to be off-cuts from that film), whereas his static landscape images in comparison are over-cooked, over-processed, over-thought.