At a preview of his new exhibition at the de Young, I Dream a World, Sir Isaac Julien said the title, which comes from a Langston Hughes poem, is what he tries to do with his multi-channel video installations: reimagine a world.

“In my work, I try to construct a repertoire of images that are oppositional and self-sustaining,” Julien said. “They’re not confined just to reactions, but are capable of generating their own poetics—a visual language that, in a way, nurtures resistance.”

Julien, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2022 for his work in diversity and inclusion in the arts, is happy his first U.S. retrospective is at the de Young. A professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Bay Area is important to him, and Julien splits his time between California and London, where he was born.

The 10 video installations in I Dream a World cover subjects that range from masculinity and cowboys in the American West (The Long Road to Mazatlán), to abolitionist Frederick Douglas—who was enslaved and became a prominent writer, speaker, and the most photographed man of the 19th century (Lessons of the Hour)---to Matthew Henson, the Black explorer who was among the first to reach the North Pole (True North).

Installation view of Isaac Julien, "'Once Again... (Statues Never Die),' 2022, in 'Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is to Me,' Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21, Düsseldorf, 2023–2024. (© Isaac Julien; courtesy of the artist and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21, Düsseldorf; photograph by Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf)

You could, literally, spend hours at I Dream a World—four and a half, to be exact—if you were to watch all 10 film installations from start to finish. The galleries have been transformed into six screening rooms, some showing more than one film. (Helpful signage outside lets you know which film is playing and how far along it is, so you can plan your viewing experience accordingly.)

The idea of an Issac Julien retrospective of this kind has been brewing for more than six years at the de Young. When Thomas Campbell was hired as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, one of his first conversations with Claudia Schmuckli, the chief curator of modern and contemporary art, was about Julien’s work. Campbell was immediately on board—he’d been “blown away” when he saw the artist’s Ten Thousand Waves in 2010.

The work, which deals with the 2004 drowning of 23 Chinese migrants who were harvesting cockles in northwest England, uses thermal video of the search for survivors, as well as audio of the call that alerted police to the disaster. When the show opens on April 12, Ten Thousand Waves will play in Wilsey Court, a free public space in the museum.

Isaac Julien 'When the Tree Blooms (Ten Thousand Waves),' 2010 Endura Ultra photograph, 70 7/8 x 94 1/2 in. (180 x 240 cm)(© Isaac Julien Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco)

Julien’s work is distinguished by a compelling fusion of historical fact and speculative fiction, along with social critique and immersive aesthetics, says Schmuckli. He shoots across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe, exploring the forces impacting communities around the world.

Julien trained as a filmmaker at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, where he co-founded the Sankofa Film and Video Collective in 1982. He continued making films into the 1990s, winning an award at the Cannes Film Festival for his first feature, Young Soul Rebels, in 1991.

In Long Road to Mazatlán (1999) and Paradise Omeros (2002), Julien’s work began to change, presenting three screens like triptychs, according to Schmuckli. In Baltimore (2003), the screens had an angular arrangement, creating an environment for the viewer to enter.

“That became the defining format for Julien's work throughout the 2000s,” she explains. “It informed the making of True North and Fantôme Afrique, and Western Union: small boats, slowly moving away from the walls and onto screens.”

Installation view of Isaac Julien, "Baltimore," 2003, in "Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971," Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, 2022.(© Isaac Julien; courtesy the artist and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles)

In his work, Julien folds the past into the present. Even though his films often center on actual events such as the migration of African refugees across the Mediterranean Sea (Western Union: small boats), the subjects of his films are not locked into time or place.

While online messaging and social media try to polarize us and reduce us to one thing, Schmuckli explains, Julien’s installations do the opposite.

“They are deep and thoughtful meditations on the dynamics of power and how they impact lives,” she says. “They always feel expansive. One of the things that I feel very strongly about is that, through his use of montage in this parallel format dispersed across multiple screens, he has developed a narrative format that emphasizes complexity of selfhood and identity formation—and the beauty within. And that, I think, is so needed at all times, but particularly in this moment.”

// Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is at the de Young Museum, April 12th through July 13th; 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr. (Golden Gate Park), famsf.org