In Isaac Julien’s thrilling show, I Dream a World at the de Young, the shifting images on gallery screens seem to respond to one another with something approaching sentience. If montage is the language that film uses to communicate things like character, plot and emotion to us, then Julien’s elaborate video pieces speak in a cinematic language I’ve never heard before.
While most directors attempt to use the language of montage to tell a story roughly analogous to a novel, installation artists like Julien do something else entirely. The word “poem” comes to mind to describe the British artist’s work, but “fractal” is perhaps more fitting; Julien’s large-scale video projections get deeper and more complex the further you move through them. Images, words, sounds, colors and themes reproduce themselves across the multiple screens of Julien’s installation pieces, sending the eye ricocheting around in an effort to take it all in.
The de Young’s show, on view through July 13, 2025, is a buffet of 10 video installations that very compellingly explores questions around Black and queer experiences, visual culture and the history of otherness. Given the larger political situation in which the show takes place, it feels urgent and necessary. At a time when overwrought and absurdly illogical denunciations of “DEI” are used to stifle free thought, I Dream a World shows just why deep contemplation and real empathy are essential to unraveling the thorny questions at the heart of the American project.
Watching one of Julien’s installation pieces tends to feel absorbing and cumulative, as though the work is teaching you how to watch it as you go along. It can also feel exuberant and even overwhelming — part of Julien’s aesthetic is to give a viewer far more than can be seen with just two human eyeballs. In fact, his pieces Ten Thousand Waves and Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) arrange their many screens in such a way that it’s not physically possible to take everything in from a single vantage point. Viewers must navigate their way around the screening space, making choices about where to stand and look.
In spite of these formal devices that impose a degree of effort onto viewers, the installations in I Dream a World do not feel opaque or off-puttingly abstract. Visually and emotionally stimulating, they offer multiple points of entry. It’s possible to walk right into the middle of a screening and quickly become immersed. (This is one of the benefits of pursuing fractal cinema over narrative.)
Frequently Julien’s screens seem to interact, bouncing ideas and images off of one another, moving in sync (then de-syncing), echoing slightly different versions of things around the gallery, establishing their unique rhythms and pulses. In a particularly electric moment from A Marvellous Entanglement, about the life and work of the radical Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, the rightmost screen shows an older version of Bardi while the leftmost screen shows a youthful version, the center screen wandering through one of her buildings. In an elegant syncopation, the younger Bardi echoes the words of the older Bardi at a slight delay, bringing to mind questions about how age and appearance affect how we hear what someone says.
