Hauntingly beautiful, Isaac Julien’s installation at the MCA is a must-see

In an age where so-called political and postcolonial art tends toward sermonising, Isaac Julien’s Once Again… (Statues Never Die) is unexpectedly healing. The acclaimed British artist doesn’t overstate the politics of his work, although they linger in every frame of his extraordinary black-and-white five-screen film installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art. His art is not polemical. Its power lies in its artistic refinement, not in loud proclamations of political messaging.

Once Again… doesn’t tell you what to think or dictate how to feel. Instead, the film explores a timely issue: the repatriation of African art and its place in Western museums through fragments of dialogue, soulful music, homoerotic scenes, snow-white landscapes and sleek modernist architecture. Amid all this splendour, the narrative elegantly and persuasively reveals colonialism’s enduring impacts without suggesting a solution.

Isaac Julien’s Once Again... (Statues Never Die) at the MCA.

Born in London in 1960, Julien has worked across artistic disciplines to examine African migration experiences, Black queer identities, and Black history and culture for more than three decades. He rose to fame with his 42-minute black-and-white film Looking for Langston (1989), which celebrated the sensual private world of poet, playwright and novelist Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. In 1991, his debut feature film, Young Soul Rebels, was released and claimed the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Once Again... was commissioned by the Philadelphia-based Barnes Foundation and follows the relationship between the art institute’s founder, Albert C. Barnes, and the philosopher and critic Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar who became known as the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance. It draws on their real-life interactions, as Locke visited and researched the collection Barnes was growing.

When I walked into the exhibition space at the MCA, I was immediately affected by the visual power of five towering screens placed at odd angles, each featuring different scenes. The film stages a dialogue between Barnes (Danny Huston) and Locke (André Holland), with Julien’s script made from real excerpts of their writing. While their tone is measured, even polite, it traces the deep connections between colonialism’s legacy and art history.

Their philosophical dialogue contrasts with the erotic presence of another protagonist, Black modernist sculptor Richmond Barthé (Devon Terrell), whose figurative sculptures and imagined relationship with Locke add a fierce erotic tension. My favourite scene is when Locke and Barthé stroll together, admiring classical statues of male nudes, appreciating the beauty of men.

There’s archival footage of plundered African artworks held in the British Museum, cut from a 1970 film by Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo and photos depicting the violent looting from the Benin Expedition in 1897, which gear shift into sensual scenes from Looking For Langston. Sharlene Whyte plays a curator who walks stridently through the controversial Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. There’s a score from Brooklyn-based singer and songwriter Alice Smith, whose singing is the film’s melancholy undercurrent. The hairs on my neck rose as she bellowed, “I’m making a new way”, drawing out the irreconcilability of the beauty of Julien’s film and the ugliness of the history represented.

The work demands movement, and the mirrored, circular walls of the exhibition space mean Locke is reflected at you many times over. The installation also includes several of Barthe’s sculptures as well as works by American artist Matthew Angelo Harrison and African sculptures on loan from the Australian Museum. The immersive effect makes you both voyeur and witness to the theft of what Barnes called “primitive” art; you’re implicated in a colonial history you can do nothing to stop.

In the final scene, Locke stands still, eyes closed. Snow starts to fall and then rise, a surreal and dreamlike reversal of nature. As the snow falls upward, Locke reads from the words of bell hooks, the late feminist scholar, writer, activist and Julien’s close friend. Hooks’ words capture what is at the heart of Once Again... In the dream world of art, there is freedom. As an artist, I know first-hand that we can exist in art and the imagination without the burden of race, class, or nationality. That life is not something outside of us but something we absorb and carry within. Colonialism splits the individual, forcing them to internalise its standards without fully accepting them. In the film, Locke holds this tension in himself – he speaks to Barnes about the value of African art and how the West consumes it. He is a man formed by the very structures he questions.

In many ways, Locke is a mirror of Julien, who has been knighted by the British Empire and recognised for his contributions to art. This knighthood places Julien within the very structures of the power he interrogates. As with Locke’s position as a Black intellectual in a white academic world, Julien is both inside and outside. He cannot be easily categorised, and neither can his work. Once Again... gives us a way to think about art, race, and colonialism that isn’t either/or, but layered and overlapping.

Filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien.Credit: Tim Walker

Julien’s artistic gift is a queer impulse toward the reparative. Knowing the damage is done, not turning away or smoothing it over, but using art to dig through the wreck, searching for hope. Julien doesn’t use art to try to fix what’s broken. Instead, he works with what’s left, gathering fragments of stories. He makes something new from these fragments – a quiet restoration, stitching art and life together from the effects of colonialism.

Julien describes this work as “poetic restitution”, meaning Once Again… is far more than just a critique of British theft. I saw the exhibition twice. Even going alone, I couldn’t absorb all its silent details and cultural weight in one visit. Julien draws you in with visuals and sounds of tremendous beauty, and it’s within that beauty that he allows pain to slowly emerge. The film doesn’t resolve the pain so much as let it simmer quietly. It will challenge you to think about the relationship between art, history, race and sexuality in refreshing and elegant ways. It’s a must-see exhibition.

Cherine Fahd is an artist and associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

Once Again… (Statues Never Die) is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, until February 16.