The afterlife of images : an interview with Isaac Julien

Isaac Julien is a British artist and filmmaker who has worked across a variety of mediums and genres, including feature film, television documentary and video installation. His works include the beautiful black-and-white paean to the Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes, Looking for Langston (1989), the feature film Young Soul Rebels (1991), set against competing youth music sub-cultures in Britain, and a documentary exploring 'blaxploitation' cinema, Baadasssss Cinema (2002). His video installation Baltimore, 2003 - set in the city famed as the headquarters of the American civil rights movement and featuring the acknowledged originator of the blaxploitation film genre Melvin Van Peebles - was a highlight of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition of video works from the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.' His meditation on the sublime, True north 2004, recently appeared at Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery and the Auckland Triennial. While Julien's work has often been discussed in terms of its engagement with representations of race and sexuality, in this interview the artist challenges such easy stereotyping, musing on the relationship between politics and pleasure, the phenomenon of the post-cinematic, and the role of the archive in his work