Isaac Julien: Fantôme Afrique
February 28 through May 11, 2008
OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, February 28, 5:00-7:00pm
PUBLIC LECTURE:
Join artist Isaac Julien for a special lecture on his recent work.
Thursday, February 28, 4-5 PM
FREE
McCune Conference Room, 6th floor, Humanities & Social Science Bldg Rm 6020
UC Santa Barbara
Isaac Julien: installation view, Fantôme Afrique, 2005 © Isaac Julien
British artist Isaac Julien has received international acclaim for his film installations. To produce Fantôme Afrique, he brought actors and a crew to Burkina Faso to capture the bustling capital city of Ouagadougou as well as the parched spaces of the countryside. He combined this original footage with historical films to present a rich spectacle of architecture, urbanism, and dance interwoven with references to the history of cinema, including Hollywood, European colonial documentaries, and contemporary African cinema.
In Fantôme Afrique, Julien paints a picture of West Africa as a place where a multitude of traditions intersect—where European, Arabic, and black African civilizations meet and cross with contemporary, transnational culture. The film is brought to life by two protagonists, male and female, who appear in multiple urban and rural sites. The man, renowned choreographer and dancer Stephen Galloway (Ballet Frankfurt), dances through such spaces as a desert mosque and severe modernist buildings, appearing and suddenly disappearing as if by magic. The woman Vanessa Myrie (who has appeared in other Julien work), steady and self-possessed in her movements, passes in turn through crowded streets, a vacant outdoor cinema, and the ramparts and granaries of an ancient village. Galloway and Myrie figure as “trickster/phantom” and “witness” in this carefully composed meditation on the denationalized, de-territorialized spaces born of the encounters between local and global cultures, where the ghosts of history linger amid the realities of the present.
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Isaac Julien: Biography
Isaac Julien studied painting and fine art film at St Martin’s School of Art, graduating in 1984. He founded Sankofa Film and Video Collective (1983 – 1992) and was a founding member of Normal Films in 1991 and JN Films in 2002. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 for his films The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), made in collaboration with Javier de Frutos and Vagabondia (2000), choreographed by Javier de Frutos. Earlier works include Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), which won the Pratt and Whitney Canada Grand Prize, 15th International Festival of Films on Art in 1997, Young Soul Rebels (1991) which was awarded the Semaine de la critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival the same year, and the acclaimed poetic documentary Looking for Langston (1989).
He was visiting lecturer at Harvard University’s Schools of Afro-American and Visual Environmental Studies and is currently a visiting faculty member of the Independent Study Programme (ISP) at the Whitney Museum of American Art . He was also a research fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is a Trustee of the Serpentine Gallery, Iniva and Artpace. Julien was the recipient of both the prestigious MIT Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts (2001) and the Frameline Lifetime Achievement Award (2002). His work Paradise Omeros was presented as part of Documenta XI in Kassel (2002). In 2003 he won the Grand Jury Prize at the Kunstfilm Biennale in Cologne for his single screen version of Baltimore and the Aurora Award in 2005. Most recently, he has had solo shows at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (2005), MoCA Miami (2005) and the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2006). He was a recipient of Résidences Internationales aux Recollets, Paris in 2007.
He is represented in museum and private collections throughout the world, including Tate, the Government Art Collection, Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum. In autumn 2007 his most recent work WESTERN UNION: Small Boats premiered at Metro Pictures, New York, and he presented a live multi-screen performance work, Cast No Shadow, at Sadler’s Wells, London and BAM, New York (Peforma 07).
He is represented by Victoria Miro Gallery, London, Metro Pictures, New York and Galeria Helga de Alvear, Madrid. He is currently completing a biopic film and an exhibition (which opens at the Serpentine Gallery, London 23 February 2008) on Derek Jarman with Tilda Swinton.
MEDIA CONTACT: Marie Vierra - (805) 893-2951 - vierra@uam.ucsb.edu
Portrait of an Archive: Selections from the Architecture & Design Collection
and
First Person
October 17, 2007 - May 11, 2008
Portrait of an Archive highlights the work of ten designers who have helped to alter the face of twentieth-century California. Including personal portraits and professional materials, the exhibition presents a range of items from designs for prefabricated housing to roadside service stations. The artifacts are all drawn from the University Art Museum’s Architecture & Design Collection (ADC), the leading design archives in Southern California. Just as the ADC explores the diversity of the built environment through its historic collections, Portrait of an Archive provide insights into the impact that technology, consumption, and fantasy have played in shaping our contemporary landscape. Mirroring the rich variety of the ADC’s holdings, Portrait of an Archive features original drawings, photographs, models, furniture, and video footage work by noted designers Gregory Ain (1908-1988), Albert Frey (1903-1998), Edward A. Killingsworth (1917-2004), Paul Lászlò (1900-1993), Cliff May (1908-1989), Lutah Maria Riggs (1896-1984), R.M. Schindler (1887-1953), Whitney R. Smith (1911-2002), Robert B. Stacy-Judd (1884-1975), and Kem Weber (1889-1963).
First Person gathers a selection of contemporary art objects which take the identity of artist as their subject. While portraits often use mimesis to represent the sitter, these objects employ language, abstraction, and symbolism to convey identity and include video, drawings, and photographs. John Coplans dissects his naked body through a series of sequential black-and-white images, revealing many parts and much detail, but hot his face and eyes. At a glance, Gillian Wearing’s photographs appear as conventional family portraits; yet it is the artist posing as her grandparents (see images below). Elaborate makeup and exacting clothing challenge viewers to register the images’ true sitter. Other works, by Jonathan Borofsky and Jim Shaw draw their imagery from the subconscious world of dreams. Mona Hatoum and Glenn Ligon linguistically use the first person. A looping video seems to trap Hatoum in time, while Ligon effectively travels back in history through the guise of slave narratives. These varied approaches to self-representation assert the makers’ identities, even as they question objectivity.
First Person is a related project of “I am the Medium,” a cross-campus presentation of contemporary performance-based work, October 29 - November 2, 2007.
World of Wonders: A Renaissance Cabinet
On permanent display
View of UAM Renaissance Cabinet
Why did the first European museums—cabinets of curiosity or Wunderkammern in German—display masterpieces of Renaissance art together with marvels of nature and science, and treasures from across the globe? What did visitors to these early museums experience? The University Art Museum addresses these and other issues in a lively new installation which juxtaposes its Renaissance collections with diverse items from other campus holdings, from fossils and gemstones to stuffed animals and musical instruments.
The historical cabinet of curiosities sought to represent the world at large within the confines of a single room. In a curiosity cabinet, works of art mingled with natural specimens, tools and instruments, ethnographic materials and technological marvels. The entire world of what was knowable was represented, and it was the ambition of the collector and the viewer to understand the world through examining these varied objects.
World of Wonders: A Renaissance Cabinet offers visitors the chance to see the world through Renaissance eyes. The enormous range of objects and materials densely installed in the small space of the gallery creates sometimes startling and sometimes sublime juxtapositions and oppositions. Just like visitors to the Renaissance cabinet, UAM’s viewers are free to navigate the space by following open-ended chains of association forged by these comparisons. Arranged by theme, each gallery wall presents a new set of ideas to the viewer, including: the vast range of materials out of which the artifacts are made; the relationship of art and nature; portraiture and identity; ordering schemes like the four elements, the four seasons, and the five senses; local and exotic; telling religious and secular stories; and the nature of miracles, marvels, and monsters.
For this Renaissance Wunderkammer, the UAM has drawn its inspiration specifically from its modern setting on a university campus. As curator Mark Meadow notes, “Renaissance collections of this type were sites of active learning and research, just like the modern university. The remarkable diversity of their contents closely matches the range of materials found in the university today, for similar reasons.” With objects loaned from across the whole spectrum of disciplines and research fields, the installation reminds us that the modern university is one of the last institutions that matches the curiosity cabinet in its aspiration to encompass universal knowledge. Objects on view in the gallery have been borrowed from UC Santa Barbara’s Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration, The Henry Eichheim Collection of Musical Instruments the Special Collections of the Davidson Library, the Charles Douglas Woodhouse Mineral Collection, among others. Several works from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art augment the University holdings. At the heart of the World of Wonders, however, is the UAM’s own worldclass Renaissance holdings, The Sedgwick Collection of oil paintings and the Sigmund Morgenroth Collection of Medals and Plaquettes.
The exhibition is the outcome of a collaboration of among art history faculty, graduate students and museum staff, under the curatorial leadership of Professor. Mark Meadow, Department of the History of Art and Architecture. World of Wonders: A Renaissance Cabinet is generously supported by the Kress Foundation and the College of Letters and Sciences at UC Santa Barbara.
Museum Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday, 12 – 5 pm. Closed Mondays, Tuesdays, holidays, and for major installations.
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