This event is part of the New Work in the Arts and Humanities: Bodies of Knowledge series.

To mark the beginning of his residency at the American Academy in Rome, the artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien presents his recent works from Ten Thousand Waves (2010), a response to the Morecambe Bay tragedy in 2004, and PLAYTIME: KAPITAL in 2014, to his contributions to this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale and his current project on the life and work of the Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. The talk will be followed by a conversation with the curator and writer Mark Nash.

Julien has been working on a range of critically acclaimed projects whose collective objective is to break down the barriers that exist between different artistic disciplines, drawing from and commenting on film, dance, photography, music, theater, painting, and sculpture, and uniting these to construct powerful visual narratives. Concerned with the experiential and the complex layering of ideas, Julien reveals his artistic and research processes to the audience; the ways in which these works very much lead on from one another and form a certain conceptual trajectory.

Julien’s upcoming work on the seminal figure Lina Bo Bardi builds on and extrapolates from his concerns about individuals deeply affected by the crisis and the global flow of capital. A three-part project, Stones Against Diamonds, the first of which premiered during this year’s Venice Biennale and Art Basel as unique site-specific installations, Julien gives a platform to the breadth of Bo Bardi’s creative impulse and egalitarian beauty of her work.

Julien is the Mary Miss Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall 2015. The event will be held in English.