Issac Julien’s latest CT video installation honors famed architect Lina Bo Bardi
The magical motion picture imagery of British filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien continues to suffuse Connecticut.
The artist’s meditation on Frederick Douglass and the art of photography, “Lessons of the Hour,” just finished its summerlong run at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Another of his captivating video installations, “Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement,” is being screened at the
Yale Architecture Gallery. The exhibit was arranged by the Yale Center for
British Art but couldn’t be installed there since that building is being extensively renovated this year.
“Lessons of the Hour” flitted across three adjacent screens and had a fairly linear storyline of Douglass taking a trip to give a lecture in the 1800s, punctuated with 20th-century images of civil rights protests. “A Marvellous Entanglement” unfurls over nine screens, arranged in a circle so that you have to constantly turn to take it all in. Some of the images are repetitive or complementary. Others are oppositional.
The subject is the audacious Italian-born Brazilian architect, who died in 1992. Bardi is portrayed in Julien’s piece by two actresses of different ages. They represent her at distinct phases of her life and career, yet they also sometimes are shown on adjacent screens speaking the same lines at the same time in the same location. The performances are warm and effusive and convince you that you are watching the architect herself not women impersonating her. Bardi was a true maverick, “horrified” by such modern comforts as air conditioning, carpeting and upholstering and instead designing giant rounded unadorned window spaces that are almost cave-like in their openness or a gallery space that minimizes the need for frames or even walls.
Julien uses those windows, galleries and other aspects of Bardi’s buildings as framing devices for his striking screen images. He enlivens Bardi’s environments with dances, pageantry and communities. The viewing experience, sitting on basic wooden blocks that mimic Bardi’s aesthetic, can be mesmerizing and overwhelming, drawing you into buildings and worlds
as if you were entering through those windows rather than just watching them on screens.
“Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous
Entanglement” is presented by the Yale Center for British Art through Dec. 10 at the Yale Architecture Gallery, 180 York St., New Haven. Admission is free. britishart. yale.edu.