Soulscapes Exhibition @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London - A major exhibition of landscape art that expands and redefine the genre

Soulscapes

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

14 February – 2 June 2024

Mónica de Miranda 

Sunrise, 2023 

Inkjet print on cotton paper 

Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid 

Isaac Julien 

Onyx Cave (Stones Against Diamonds), 2015 

© Isaac Julien / Private collection, London

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents Soulscapes, a major exhibition of landscape art that expands and redefine the genre. Featuring more than 30 contemporary works, it spans painting, photography, film, tapestry and collage from leading artists including Hurvin Anderson, Phoebe Boswell, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Kimathi Donkor, Isaac Julien, Marcia Michael, Mónica de Miranda and Alberta Whittle, as well as some of the most important emerging voices working today.

Soulscapes explores our connection with the world around us through the eyes of artists from the African Diaspora. It considers the power of landscape art and reflect on themes of belonging, memory, joy and transformation.

The exhibition is curated by Lisa Anderson, Managing Director of the Black Cultural Archives and founder of Black British Art. Anderson said: “Soulscapes grew from the periods of enforced ‘lockdown’ that millions experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the same period, the question of racial equality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement helped ignite conversation about inclusion and social justice. These historical moments gave way to new possibilities for landscape art, which is being interrogated by artists in new and expansive ways. At a time when global consciousness has been profoundly attuned to the precariousness and power of the natural world in our lives, I hope this exhibition will challenge perceptions of our relationship with nature.”

Hurvin Anderson 

Limestone Wall, 2020  

© Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery 

Photo: Richard Ivey

Jermaine Francis 

A Pleasant Land. J. Samuel Johnson, 

& the Spectre of Unrecognised Black Figures, 2023 

Photographic montage, 130cm x 100cm 

Courtesy of Artist Jermaine Francis

The exhibition opens by examining the theme of belonging in relation to the natural world and consider the varied ways we experience the land and how this relates to our sense of identity, connection and safety. Limestone Wall (2020), a large-scale painting by Hurvin Anderson, depicts the tropical foliage of Jamaica and explores the artist’s relationship to his ancestral homeland. In the series A Pleasant Land. J. Samuel Johnson, & The Spectre of Unrecognised Black Figures (2023), photographer Jermaine Francis considers the issues that arise out of interactions with our everyday environments, positioning the Black figure in rural settings to instigate conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby 

Cassava Garden, 2015 

Acrylic, transfers, colour pencil, charcoal and 

commemorative fabric on paper, 182.88 x 152.4 cm 

© Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy the artist,

Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.

Photo: Robert Glowacki 

Reflecting on landscapes and memory, the exhibition considers how artists have used the natural world to express personal histories. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s lush multimedia piece, Cassava Garden (2015), layers images from fashion magazines, pictures of Nigerian pop stars, and samplings from family photo albums to represent a hybrid cultural identity. The Gallery’s mausoleum is home to a site-specific installation of Phoebe Boswell’s I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know (2019), a meditative video work created over the course of six years that documents daily life in Zanzibar, a place of deep connection for the artist.

Kimathi Donkor 

On Episode Seven, 2020

Acrylic on canvas, 61 x 76 cm

Courtesy of the Artist and Niru Ratnam, London

Photo: Kimathi Donkor

Che Lovelace 

Moonlight Searchers, 2022

Acrylic and dry pigment on board panels 

Private collection. 

Courtesy of the artist, Corvi Mora, Various Small Fires 

and Nicola Vassell Gallery 

Soulscapes celebrates the power of landscapes to evoke joy and pleasure, whether through the representation of personal experiences or through its expression in composition, colour and style. Che Lovelace’s vibrant paintings, The Climber (2022) and Moonlight Searchers (2022), depict the flora, fauna, figures, landscapes and rituals of the Caribbean. Paintings from Kimathi Donkor’s Idyl series (2016-2020) depict Black subjects free to be themselves within nature, hopeful visions that might be approached through the idea of Black Joy. 

Artist Kimathi Donkor, said: “My ‘Idyl’ paintings celebrate tender and contemplative moments shared by families and friends as they enjoy serene meadows, lakes, mountains, forests, rivers and beaches together. As an artist who has often focussed on ‘the struggle’, these works represent hopeful visions that honour what the fulfilment of black liberation might sometimes feel like -- even if only fleetingly.” 

Kimathi Mafafo 

Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery, 2020 

Hand and Machine Embroidered Fabric, 112 x 98cm 

Image courtesy of the artist / Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery 

Finally, the exhibition explores the transformative power of nature to stimulate healing, renewal and wellbeing. In Unforseen Journey of Self-Discovery (2020), a tapestry by Kimathi Mafafo, a woman emerges from a cocooned veil of white muslin, finding her way into the vibrant, colourful and healing space of the natural world. Works by Alberta Whittle manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-Blackness; Whittle invites viewers to interact with her work, and to imagine different futures. 

Artist Alberta Whittle said: “Within my practice, thinking about the land and the natural world as sources of indigenous, pre-colonial knowledge(s) has become a pathway to explore different ways of dreaming new ways of being. Landscape art can gather together less recognised or forgotten relationships between humanity and the land as well as become a lightning rod for galvanising conservation, especially with devastation from climate colonialism looming against the horizon.”

Jennifer Scott, Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery, said: “Soulscapes marks a new approach to landscape art. Featuring some of the greatest artists of our day, it’s an exciting opportunity to re-present the genre within Dulwich Picture Gallery, the home of the celebrated European landscape masters of the past. This visually stunning exhibition highlights the contemporary relevance of nature in art and its universal possibilities of healing, reflection and belonging.” 

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Gallery Road, London SE21 7AD

www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

Isaac Julien @ Metro Pictures, New York - Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass

Isaac Julien 

Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass
Metro Pictures, New York
Through April 13, 2019

ISAAC JULIEN 

A Chattel Becomes A Man (Lessons of The Hour), 2019

Matt archival paper, backmounted face on aluminum 

43 5/16 x 28 3/4 inches, 110 x 73 cm

Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Isaac Julien’s visionary ten-screen film installation Lessons of the Hour explores the incomparable achievements of America’s foremost abolitionist figure. After escaping slavery in Maryland, Frederick Douglass gained celebrity on the abolitionist circuit as an extraordinary orator, becoming the most photographed American of the 19th century. Julien’s project is informed by some of Douglass’s most important speeches, such as “Lessons of the Hour,” “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?,” and “Lecture on Pictures,” the latter being a text that connects picture-making and photography to his vision of how technology could influence human relations. Isaac Julien's immersive work gives expression to the zeitgeist of Douglass’s era, his legacy, and the ways in which his story may be viewed through a contemporary lens.

Created in consultation with Douglass scholar Celeste-Marie Bernier of the University of Edinburgh, Isaac Julien’s film imagines the person of Frederick Douglass through a series of tableaux vivants and gives life to his relationships with other cultural icons of the time. Mostly women, these characters were chosen for being representatives of ideals of equality and include African-American photographer J.P. Ball; Douglass’s wives Anna Murray and Helen Pitts; Anna and Ellen Richardson, the English Quakers who allowed Douglass to return to the United States as a free man; Susan B. Anthony, the suffragist and Douglass’s longtime friend; and Ottilie Assing, German intellectual, activist, and Douglass’s lover.

Employing both 35mm film and the latest 4K digital technology, the film was shot in Washington, D.C., where Douglass lived late in life and where in 1894 he gave his final speech, “Lessons of the Hour,” which addressed the shocking phenomenon of lynching in the post-Civil War American South. Additional filming took place in Scotland and England, where Douglass delivered over four hundred anti-slavery speeches––several of which Julien had reenacted inside the period rooms of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The presentation at the gallery includes four tintype portraits of characters who are featured in Lessons of the Hour–– Frederick Douglass, J.P. Ball, and Anna Murray Douglass. The series is titled Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow after a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Douglass once said was “the most promising colored man in America.” To create the works Julien had a tintype camera and developing facility on the film set provided by photographer Rob Ball, who produced the tintypes for the Lessons of the Hour project. Additionally, the exhibition will feature a selection of color photographs from Lessons of the Hour, a number of found archival images that appear in the film, and an assemblage of black and white analog photographs related to Julien's film Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983). Reflecting upon the death of Colin Roach, a 23-year-old black man who was shot dead at a police station in London’s East End, this early work meditates on the continued quest for equality that was Douglass’s life-long ambition, while also evoking the current Black Lives Matter movement.

An original score for the film was created by composer Paul Gladstone Reid. This is Isaac  Julien’s first work made in the United States since Baltimore (2003). Lessons of the Hour was commissioned and acquired by the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, where it is on view through May 12, 2019.

ISAAC JULIEN lives and works in London and Santa Cruz, California. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Saint Louis Art Museum; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; SESC Pompeia, São Paulo; and Aspen Art Museum. His acclaimed film installation Ten Thousand Waves has been exhibited in Shanghai, Sydney, Madrid, Helsinki, São Paolo, Gwangju, Gothenburg, Moscow, New York, Miami, and London. Isaac Julien has participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial; the 8th Shanghai Biennale; 2012’s La Triennale at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the 56th Venice Biennale. His films have been included in renowned film festivals such as the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, and Venice Film Festival. Most recently Julien received the Charles Wollaston Award (2017) for most distinguished work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and in 2018 he was made a Royal Academician. He was awarded the title Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s Birthday Honors, 2017. Isaac Julien is Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he and Professor of the Arts Mark Nash are establishing the Isaac Julien Lab. The newly conserved director’s cut of Julien and Nash’s film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (1996) has just been released by Film Movement Distributors, New York.

METRO PICTURES
519 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
www.metropictures.com