Artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien discusses the representation of capital in film, performance art, the media and popular culture.
Julien puts his questions on the depiction of the current financial crisis to David Harvey, author of 'The Enigma of Capital'. Julien and Harvey consider the part these images play in attempting to depict what has for decades been considered notoriously impossible to represent.
Approximate duration - 90 minutes.
By purchasing a ticket, you consent to being photographed or filmed as a member of the audience
Isaac Julien (b.1960, London, UK)
Isaac Julien's film installations create an extraordinary visual language, fusing dance, photography, music, theatre and sculpture while often exploring racial and sexual identity. Remarking that 'artists, especially film makers, have always been involved in trespassing and translating cultures', Julien states that, for him, 'images have to be politically convincing to work.'
As an artist and maker of 'gallery films', his concern is to expand the concept of cinema; to break away from the convention of a passive audience that sits in front of a single screen. Many of his installations - including the recent multi-screen TEN THOUSAND WAVES (2010) - deal with themes of migration and cultural displacement on both a local and global scale, presenting an indictment of globalisation and economic inequalities.
His new work is, he says, 'about the movement of capital... the question of moving across predictable and unpredictable categorisations, spaces, subjectivities.' Isaac Julien is Professor of Media Art at the State University of Design Karlsruhe [HfG].
For over 40 years, the 'dialectical materialist' geographer David Harvey has been one of the world's most trenchant and critical analysts of capitalist development. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books, including 'Enigma of Capital and the crises of capitalism' (2010).
Capitalism, he has said, 'never solves its crises. It simply moves them from one place to another. From Brazil to Russia to Argentina to America to Britain to Greece.'