Western Union Small Boats

Artworks - 2007

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Isaac Julien’s 2007 multi-screen installation Western Union Small Boats is a work where individual voyages, journeys and travel are explored locally, in order to allude to the global scenario.

Western Union: Small Boats was produced at a time of debate about immigration policies and the relations between the individual and the geopolitical. Julien traces the effects of trauma, not just on people but also on buildings, monuments, architecture and life, by relocating these themes in a poetic manner.

Internationally renowned choreographer Russell Maliphant has choreographed a series of vignettes in several locations, utilising dance and the movement of bodies, echoing these journeys but also rearticulating them

The Leopard (2007) is an edited cinema version of the work which seeks to re-engage with these ongoing issues, humanising and lending poetic qualities, image and voice once again to questions which so often get lost amidst the noise of political agendas.

Edited into a single screen format, The Leopard (2007) uses the idiom of classical experimental cinema to communicate through the non-representational and suggestive, rather than relying on the strictly narrative. The work is not about storytelling as such, but about creating an environment in which an accumulation of sensations, through images and sound, creates a complex, thought-provoking and intriguing piece.

18'22', five-screen film installation, 16mm film transferred to digital, colour, 5.1 sound