Julien, Isaac
Entry updated 4 May 2026. Tagged: Artist, Film.
(1960- ) UK artist and filmmaker, awarded a CBE in 2017 and knighted in 2022. Much of his work addresses the Black gay experience, often through explicit engagement with artists such as writers Langston Hughes and Frantz Fanon, and filmmaker and painter Derek Jarman. The multi-screen installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) – since revised for different sites – shifts emphasis to feminist and ecological concerns, and is also inspired by number of sf writers, as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses (written circa 1-8 CD; trans Arthur Golding as The XV Books of P. Ovidius Naso, entytled Metamorphosis 1565-1567) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. It begins with a quote from Donna Harraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), and takes in Octavia E Butler, Ursula K Le Guin and Naomi Mitchison in its depiction of two goddesses who step out of a painting and travel through time and across earth ruminating on the past, future and Climate Change. Metamorphosis, change and humanity's adaptation to it are expressed as the keys to our and the planet's survival. [CWa]
Isaac Julien
born London: 21 February 1960
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