A journey of many dangers

Western Union: Small Boats is Isaac Julien's meditation on the illegal migrations of thousands of people from Africa. Photo / Supplied

A woman stands in a cave by the water's edge, looking out across the blue sea. A valley is filled with the wrecks of wooden fishing boats, white and blue and red-striped, piled up in a dry landscape. Some Arabic markings can be read.

Another fishing boat is getting ready to go out, hands wrapping nylon line around a post, light through a net throwing patterns on to the water. In the boat, or another one, out at sea, an African man is hunched on deck, trying to stay out of the sun or out of sight.

A European woman smiles welcome to a grand palazzo, floor, walls and ceilings saturated with visual sensation. A black man walks through the rooms carrying a white man across his shoulders.

And so it goes, scene after carefully composed scene for 18 minutes, shot in Super 16mm colour film and transferred to high-definition format for projection on to multiple screens.

For its New Zealand installation though, British artist Isaac Julien has compressed his Western Union: Small Boats to a single screen, what he calls the "linear version."

"It's been shown on three screens, on five screens and also in a theatrical version with a dance company working with the images doing live action in front of the screens," says Julien.

When I talk to him he's on holiday in Sicily, where the work was made in 2007. Last year Julien had a residency at Two Rooms, where he made the work True South around Port Waikato and Lake Waikaremoana.

"The connection between Western Union: Small Boats and True South is the idea of working with the contaminated sublime," he says. "With Tuhoe, it was the idea of the sublime in mythology set against this landscape which is highly contested and changed by European settlement. In terms of Italy or Sicily, it is about the way in which vacations can get interrupted."

The interruption is the side-effect of the illegal migration of thousands of people from Africa to Europe. Towards the end of the piece, bodies covered by foil sheets are lined up on a beach, while on the other side of the bay tourists leap in the water.

"I come to Sicily every year and one of my friends who works as a journalist was reporting these stories of people coming from North Africa to Sicily. I've wanted to make this for about 10 years. I didn't want to do it in a conventional manner so it was a meditation on these journeys.

"In my work I often explore people because in my own history my parents came from the West Indies. It was a very different way of travelling. My parents were invited to do work, as compared to the dangerous and life-threatening journeys people are doing now."

But as a meditation on the underside of globalisation, Western Union: Small Boats is not a documentary or feature film, although Julien has produced these.

It's made as a piece of art, drawing on his training as a painter steeped in Western art history, with a parallel interest in cinema and experimental film. The camera lingers longer over a pattern or texture or face than it would in a fast-edit, plot-driven feature.

"I do know how to make conventional films if I want. This is more like a poem. I like to think of my work as how you would think about jazz or a certain notion of improvisation so the musicality of the images could be in some way be a visual notation, a musical score: how that might sound, how this could look."

He talks about the aesthetic challenge of Gericault's Medusa's Raft and ways of looking at history painting, which change over time. There are also the references to Italian cinema, in particular Luchino Visconti's adaptation of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard. Julien calls the process 'miming'.

"I adore Italy, its relationship to art history and iconography, so I wanted to explore the architecture and in a way the visuality of the culture as a whole, and I could do that through Visconti.

"The Palazzo Gangi in Palermo was where Visconti shot his dance sequence in The Leopard, so there are conversations across Sicilian and Italian film. We are travelling in time, Sicily today and yesterday. The Leopard was about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy in the face the emerging bourgeoisie, so I see this mirroring in what happens now."

He points to recent laws enacted by the Berlusconi Government aimed at making life tougher for illegal migrants. "It's a real humanitarian crisis."

Western Union: Small Boats completes a trilogy about journeying. The first, True North, was about explorer Matthew Henson, an African American who was the first to reach the North Pole on Robert Peary's 1909 expedition. It was shown at the 2007 Auckland Triennale.
The second was Fantome Africa, shot around urban and rural Burkina Faso in West Africa. The three were combined for a multimedia stage work, Cast No Shadows, at Sadler's Wells in London and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 2007.

Even in its single-screen version, Julien's work points to what is possible with art done on a large scale with large ambitions.
Downstairs are video works by Clinton Watkins, Gregory Bennett and Judy Darragh from the Two Rooms stable along with invited artists Dorota Mytych from Poland and Alex Monteith.

EXHIBITION

What: Western Union: Small Boats, by Isaac Julien
Where: Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, Newton, to September 5