Isaac Julien in SAM next week!

Artist Films and Meet the Artist
ISAAC JULIEN
Fri, 10 Jun – Sun, 12 Jun
Moving Image Gallery, Singapore Art Museum at 8Q

The Singapore Art Museum is proud to present a special series of films and talks by British film and installation artist Isaac Julien in conjunction with the exhibition Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010. A Selection from the Centre Pompidou and Singapore Art Museum Collections. Trained in painting and fine art at St Martin’s School of Art, Julien came to prominence in the film world with Looking for Langston (1989), he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001, and his films have received numerous awards, including prizes at Cannes, Kunst filmBiennale and others. He has had solo exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and MOCA Miami.

$10 for each film screening day. $5 concessions for students with valid ID, senior citizens and full-time NS men. Limited seating. Tickets can be purchased at SAM at 8Q. Please call 6332 3200 ahead of time for ticket availability.

FRI, 10 JUN | 7.30pm

This screening is rated M18

Baltimore (Single screen), 2002, 14 mins
Set in three Baltimore institutions — the Walters Art Museum, the Contemporary Museum and the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum — this is a homage to the blaxploitation genre of films, in particular the work of Melvin Van Peebles.

BaadAsssss Cinema, 2002, 56 mins
Blaxploitation was a deeply influential, short-lived flourishing of commercial Black independent filmmaking in the early 1970s. This documentary follows the development of this controversial genre from its inception, through its glory days, up to Tarantino’s homage to it in his 1997 film Jackie Brown.

SAT, 11 JUN

Artist talk by Isaac Julien | 2.30pm – 4pm
Complimentary with purchase of an admission ticket.

Film screenings | 7:30pm
This screening is rated R21

Featuring an introduction to the films and post-screening discussion with director Isaac Julien.

Looking for Langston, 1989, 40 mins
Revered Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes is invoked as a black gay cultural icon against an impressionistic, atmospheric setting that parallels a Harlem speakeasy of the 1920s with a 1980s London nightclub.

Derek, 2008, 78 mins, R21 (Some mature content and nudity)
Filmmaker Derek Jarman was perhaps the single most crucial figure of British independent cinema from the 1970s through the 1990s, and a vital part of that moment that made sixties London a capital of the art world. From Sebastiane (1976) to Blue (1992), his films constantly interrogated time and art, and epitomised his own era. He is noted for his close involvement with gay liberation movements and Aids activism. He was also a painter.

This film is a fascinating history of artist Derek Jarman contextualising his art in his time. Besides the feature films and Super 8 films spanning three decades, there are extensive video clips Jarman recorded from the early 1970s for artists such as the Smiths and Pet Shop Boys, and for television and international film festivals, as well as various news media clips. These fragments juxtapose Jarman’s own work with the images of British and world history that generated them

At the film’s centre is a day-long interview Jarman recorded in 1990 with Colin MacCabe. Taking place in the midst of the great creative period in which he produced Edward II, Caravaggio and Blue, this is a “time capsule” that serves as a survey of his life from the point of view of his death. A letter to Derek Jarman written and read in voiceover by Tilda Swinton serves as a beguiling narrative thread throughout the film.

Derek won the Seattle International Film Festival Documentary Competition Prize in 2008, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was nominated for a Royal Television Society Programme Award in the UK.

SUN, 12 JUN | 7.30pm

This screening is rated R21

Short Films by Isaac Julien:

Vagabondia, 2000, 8 mins
A conservator imagines the buried stories and the hidden histories within the cornucopia of colonial plunder found in Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.

The Long Road to Mazatlán, 1999, 20 mins
This film is a tale of frustration and loss, mixing familiar images of the West—the cowboy, cattle yard and dirt road—with homoerotic and unsettling iconography.

Paradise Omeros, 2002, 20 mins
Set in 1960s London and present-day St. Lucia, this mediation on the hybrid state of “creoleness” is based on Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott’s epic 1990 poem Omeros.

True North, 2004, 14 mins
This sublime film is inspired by the story of the black American explorer Matthew Henson (1866-1955), who, together with Robert Peary, was one of the first people to reach the North Pole.

The Leopard, 2010, 20 mins
Taking its title and visual starting point from Luchino Visconti’s 1963 masterpiece The Leopard, this film is an examination of the cinematic afterlife, and is haunted by characters from other places and other films.

Please visit http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg for more information.

Credit Suisse: Innovation In Art Series
Video, An Art, A History 1965 – 2010: A Selection from the Centre Pompidou and Singapore Art Museum Collections

text above is taken from http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/