He makes a demand for boundless, often queer Black histories as a means of conjuring a liberating dream space in the face of reality. Julien uses and then redefines the visual medium as a tool against cultural erasure and capitalism.

This framework of using art as a means of recontextualising history and dissolving the boundaries between genres underpins all of Julien’s work to date, and is evident throughout the current survey of his work at London’s Tate Britain, What Freedom Is To Me.

The film combined elements of documentary, including footage of the demonstrations, with elements of performance and music videos. In his debut film the following year, Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983), he explored how the camera could be used as ‘a street weapon’ a creative approach that he learned during art workshops in secondary school and through books like the academic Teshome Gabriel’s Third Cinema in a Third World (1982) in which the camera is used to oppose whitewashed depictions of reality or history, and to indict oppressive systems by offering others forms of visualisation. Julien would later describe the death as a lightbulb moment for him, occurring during a pivotal time in the transformation of race relations, as London reckoned with its own broken system. The death sparked mass demonstrations across London as the Black community took to the streets to protest the police. Although Julien didn’t know Roach, he was just a year older than the dead man and the two lived only a few blocks apart. Roach had died while in police custody: an alleged suicide. In 1982 twenty-year-old film student Isaac Julien was walking through the East End of London when he encountered a crowd of men, women and children protesting the death of a young Black man named Colin Roach. How Julien’s transgressive reworkings of history and time itself have expanded our potential to deal with the complexities of the present and paved the way for generations of artists to come

With all my soul by rachel vincent