Documenta 11
saac Julien was a founding member of Sankofa Film/Video Collective, one of a number of film and video workshops that were set up in the UK in the 1980s to engage a new politics of representation. Sankofa's films were centrally concerned with the struggle to find a language to reflect the black experience and explore contested notions of black identities. In Looking for Langston (1989), Julien began an on-going personal and poetic exploration of these issues within a highly worked aesthetic. In his multi- channel installation work, Julien develops a post-cinematic practice of the moving image. Through its intense engagement of visual pleasure, it is at the same time concerned to expose, deflect, and reconstruct the cinematic gaze and in so doing open the audience to other concerns: complex subjective moves explore a wide range of psychic differences where questions of gender, race, or sexual difference become a matter of indirect reference rather than embodiment. His new work for Documenta11, Paradise/Omeros, explores the emblematic search for the "new life" promised by the West through an allegorical reworking of a wide range of cultural references.
