Isaac Julien is one of Britain’s most influential and critically acclaimed contemporary artists, renowned internationally as a pioneer of multi-screen moving image installations. He draws upon film, dance, music, theatre, painting and sculpture to create a distinctive poetic language through which he elaborates on class, race, sexuality and cultural histories.

Samstag Museum of Art is proud to partner with our peers at John Curtin Gallery to bring three works by this important artist to Australia for the 2022 Adelaide and Perth Festivals. The two venues each present Julien’s seminal work Ten Thousand Waves (2010), with Samstag and Curtin playing host to the Australian premiere of two recent installations: at the former, A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), while the latter exhibits Lessons of the Hour (2019).

A Marvellous Entanglement (2019) offers a meditation on the work and legacy of the visionary Italian-born Brazilian modernist architect and designer (1914–1992), who believed that the common, vernacular, and artisanal was integral to the expression of contemporary culture. A Marvellous Entanglement pays homage to one person’s impact on a nation and architecture’s ability to use what is individual about a culture and place to express a collective vision.

Moving through some of Lina Bo Bardi’s most iconic buildings Julien engages with Bo Bardi’s enduringly lively intellect, and her ability to transform feats of engineering into expressive symbols of optimism and cultural self regard.

‘We can leave the historic Bo Bardi to the historians…The thing we want to communicate is the architecture, the movement, the dynamism of it. And to use her ideas. And ask what Lina Bo Bardi and Brazil mean today. These are the questions we want to explore.’ – Isaac Julien

Like Ten Thousand Waves, A Marvellous Entanglement reflects Julien’s commitment to an artistic process predicated on lengthy field research and building meaningful collaborative relationships. This approach produces layered, lush, elaborate works that sensitively handle the complexity of human experience.

Catalogue essay by Ben Luke with introduction by Erica Green.