In Lessons of the Hour Julien conjures up the person of Frederick Douglass, played by actor Ray Fearon, lecturing a room of modern day viewers and poignantly reminding us of the potency and necessity of his words 160 years later. A lot of the works which I’ve been involved in making over the years are really about trying to create this almost haptic relationship to the image or a feeling,” Julien, 63, tells me in a sunlit room a few floors up, which overlooks the Thames. Occasionally, as in Ten Thousand Waves, partly shot on location in Shanghai Film Studios, it pans back to show the camera crews at work. In their speech and in their presence, his figures articulate a modernity of thought, a Black, queer consciousness that uses memory to enact a futurity that is rarely uttered in the museum.

and associated Afrocentric cultural practices in Brazil, the three-screen installation presents dramatic multidimensional views of a number of Bo Bardi’s iconic buildings in São Paulo and Salvador, Bahia – the latter being a particularly vibrant centre of Afro-Brazilian culture. There are natty mini video screens outside each room that tell you how close each piece is to its beginning and end. a film Julien created in 1983 to heighten awareness of the murder of a young Black man at the hands of London police officers is, at this moment in time forty years later, mirrored by the murder of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway last month. In the first room, dedicated to the UK debut of a powerful new piece, Once Again… (Statues Never Die), distorted mirrors and dimmed lights transfigure fellow visitors into amorphous shapes (more than once during the press preview, I had to check I was not about to slam into a wall).Which might stand as the definition of Julien’s own free-flowing films, which so studiously avoid mounting into narrative. The effect of such framing provides nuance to Julian’s play with time and the absurdity of singular truth. There comes a point where Julien’s “political lyricism”, to borrow a phrase from Derek Jarman, gets uncomfortably close to slick mannerism.

These cookies are absolutely necessary for the operation of the site and enable, for example, security-relevant functions. Only in Ten Thousand Waves (2010) does Julien’s aim to “utilise fantasy to make political statements”, as he puts it, miss its mark.I wanted to translate that myth to the present day and to look at Mazu as someone whose powers are waning; she wasn’t able to save the cockle pickers,” he explains. The accompanying audio, voiced by Stuart Hall, poses questions about the relative brevity of ‘the Negro being in vogue’ and associated references to the (in)visibility of homosexuality. Vagabondia, created in 2000, is set in the Soane Museum in Central London, and imagines – through the eyes of a black female curator, the invisible histories of the artefacts and the legacy of the vast undertaking of their extraction and relocation to the UK (of which the Soane Museum is a small but notable example).