The exhibition comprises photographic artworks (all dated 2022) which honour Locke’s contribution to the arts while also inviting critical conversations around the African material culture that influenced the Black cultural movement. The writings of Alain Locke and Albert C. Barnes on the meaning and value of African material culture were reproduced in Harlem Renaissance periodicals of the 1920s including Opportunity, Survey Graphic, and The Crisis.

The motif of weather and the elements of snow and winter permeate this series of photographs. They reference Christina Sharpe’s concept of weather as “the totality of our environments”* and bell hooks’ text Winter**, in which she writes, “we emerge out of the snowy mist, shadowy figures moving into clear light; in clear light… we see one another. One mystery is solved: we are the shadowy figures… looking for the door to transgressive culture that will let us in.”

* The Weather, Christina Sharpe, The New Inquiry, 19 January 2017
** bell hooks, Winter, published in Isaac Julien: Riot, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013

‘Isaac’s work has been and continues to be an engagement with the power of becoming free – of walking away from received imposed thoughts and images and walking toward ideas, thoughts, and images emerging from a commitment to an artistic aesthetic that requires utter devotion to seeing beauty as the essence of making any art. It is his profound belief that engaging beauty and cultivating our capacity to experience the beautiful is a necessary act of political resistance,’ writes bell hooks in Winter. After her death in December 2021, Julien went back to hooks’ text written for his autobiography Riot and excerpted parts of it for his immersive five-screen moving-image installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die) and dedicated this work to bell.

In Julien’s work, the totality of the artistic environment includes his photographic artworks as well as his moving-image installations, and in the case of Once Again… (Statues Never Die) those atmospheres are created between the political reality of racism and class discrimination, and the use of ‘critical fabulation,’ a speculative storytelling inhabiting what hooks describes as “the mystical diasporic dream-space.”

The portraits of André Holland as Alain Locke and Alex Part as his alter ego in Diasporic Dream-Space No. 1 and Diasporic Dream-Space No. 2 create a stunning visual diptych of two figures suspended in time under the falling snow, and this changing weather is where “a culture of infinite possibility is ready to receive us. This is artistic freedom as pure and unsullied as falling snow – as snow so deep it remains undisturbed – a whiteout.” These images encapsulate this diasporic dream-space; they are about the imaginative possibilities.

These and other photographic artworks contain visual references to Julien’s seminal film Looking for Langston, 1989, whose pioneering theme of the queer subculture of 1920s Harlem is further explored in Once Again… (Statues Never Die) through its reflection on the relationship between Alain Locke and the sculptor Richmond Barthé. For this, Barthé’s sculptures were staged at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).

In his research for Looking for Langston, Julien came across an archival image of Richmond Barthé and Alain Locke in an art gallery. Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) was a well-known African American sculptor who established his first studio in Harlem in 1930 and had a successful career throughout his lifetime. In his Black Madonna / New Negro Aesthetic, Julien pays homage to Barthé (Devon Terrell performs the role) and his 1961 bronze Black Madonna. Duality of existence – of being simultaneously in life and in a dream – is a theme of Night Rain , which takes us back to the weather, to the environment that Langston Hughes inhabited. His poem Harlem (also known as A Dream Deferred) was first published in 1951 in Hughes’ book Montage of a Dream Deferred.

Orisa’s Return is inspired by the writings of the novelist, playwright and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Orisa is an African spirit who has a key role in the Yoruba religion, while Ogun represents the warrior deity of the same religion. In his book Beyond Aesthetics, Soyinka looks at the politics and aesthetics of collecting African art. The figure in Orisa’s Return symbolises a curator, a keeper, someone with a relationship to the spiritual objects. Both works are also about the alienation effect and the clinical gaze, as all of the objects that have been taken are labelled and either displayed in glass vitrines or kept in storage. “Ogun is my muse, my protective deity. On the one hand he is a lyricist, the deity of poetry. At the same time he’s a smith, so he’s the protective deity of blacksmiths, goldsmiths […] a lover of solitude, yet he is constantly combative in society,” writes Wole Soyinka, “I’m still very much into the Yoruba Orisha religion. I consider deities to be expansions of the human imagination. And I do consider myself a spiritual person. Within the various spiritualities that I have encountered, Orisha obviously appeals to my sensibilities.“*

* “Wole Soyinka on Yoruba antiquities,” Wole Soyinka, Financial Times, 15 October 2020.

“Once again, I defend my open heart, no question. My old ways, bad old days pass me by like the weather,” the celebrated American vocalist Alice Smith sings in the musical score written and composed for Julien’s multi-screen moving-image installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die). Smith is the central motif of the photographic artwork Once Again. Time is seen here as repetition; as a revisit, a return. In the photograph, the camera holds a moment of calm triumph, of introspection and memory, as Alice Smith embodies the beautiful as a necessary act of political resistance and lets all worldly things go.