Viewing Isaac Julien: All That Changes You. Metamorphosis

Isaac Julien’s expansive practice has often been concerned with the orchestration of time. Slow, choreographed gestures and gliding camera movements create rhythms that resists urgency, encouraging contemplation. Figures appear in states of becoming—walking, floating, pausing—suggesting identity not as a fixed condition but as something continually reshaped by place and encounter. Architecture and landscape are not backdrops but active forces, pressing upon the body and absorbing its presence in return.

At Julien’s new solo exhibition All That Changes You, presented at Victoria Miro’s London galleries, a luminous series of photographs as well as a brand new, five-channel film installation, conceived as a visual poem, riffing on the theme of transformation—of bodies, landscapes, histories, and the self. Julien extends his long-standing exploration of Black subjectivity, memory, and global movement, weaving in references to writers Octavia Butler, Naomi Mitchison, Ursula K. Le Guin and philosopher Donna Haraway in a multi-layered and lyrical piece.

Sound of course plays a crucial role too. Music and voiceovers move between intimacy and grandeur, reinforcing Julien’s interest in the porous boundaries between the personal and the collective. Julien’s images are undeniably beautiful, yet they carry a quiet insistence, urging reflection on how histories—colonial, cultural, and emotional—leave their mark.