ISAAC JULIEN

Filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist, born in 1960 in London, where he lives and works. He has exhibited in some of the world's major museums and won numerous prestigious awards.

He is one of the most recognised and celebrated artists on the international scene for his powerful and poetic films and multi-channel video installations that transform exhibition spaces into immersive experiences. Since the late 1990s, the artist has also explored the field of audiovisual installations. With meticulous attention to formal aspects and exceptional narrative skills, he tackles sensitive social issues, paving the way for an experimentalism that transcends the boundaries between various artistic disciplines.

Julien was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Kunst Film Biennale in Cologne in 2003 and the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2014.

He is currently Professor of Media Art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Chair and Professor of Global Art at the University of the Arts in London. Julien also teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where, together with curator Mark Nash, he founded the Isaac Julien Lab, a space for research and visual production for students and emerging artists.

After a long career of international exhibitions and recognition at the Semaine de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival, Isaac Julien comes to Mantova with a new project inspired by Giulio Romano's frescoes and celebrating the 500th anniversary of Palazzo Te.

THE CURATOR

Lorenzo Giusti is an Italian art historian, curator and writer. Since 2018, he has been Director of GAMeC – Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo. He has curated exhibitions in Italy and abroad and publications focusing on prominent figures and rediscovered personalities of 20th-century art, as well as contemporary artists and themes.

In various roles, he has collaborated with public and private institutions and organisations such as Kunsthaus Baselland, Bocconi University, Art Dubai, the Venice Biennale, Artissima Torino, Curated by Vienna, Palazzo Grassi–Punta della Dogana in Venice, OGR Torino, the Shenzhen Animation Biennale, FRAC Corse, Triennale Milano, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and others.

He is the creator and co-curator of the Radio GAMeC platform, recognised by UNESCO as one of the best museum programmes in the world during the Covid pandemic.

His interests focus in particular on the relationship between ecological thought and contemporary arts, within a perspective that in recent years has drawn closer to the post-anthropocentric paradigm – an outlook that goes beyond the centrality of the human being, acknowledging value and agency in all living beings as well as in natural elements.

This line of research has taken shape through a series of curatorial projects, including the 9th Biennale Gherdeina (2022), an event deeply rooted in the Alpine landscape. The edition he curated explored post-anthropocentric trajectories through a dialogue between contemporary artistic practices and symbolic dimensions of the “wild,” understood as a space of otherness and resistance to the devices of cultural domestication.

Since 2024 he has been Artistic Director and co-curator, together with the curatorial team of GAMeC – Sara Fumagalli and Valentina Gervasoni – and Marta Papini, of Thinking Like a Mountain – the Biennale of the Orobie, which continues and deepens the reflection on the connections between art, territories, and communities.

The collaboration between Lorenzo Giusti and Fondazione Palazzo Te is inscribed within this research trajectory, as an opportunity to question the relationship between the human, the living, and ecological systems within a historical-iconographic framework.

Starting from the observation of the fresco cycles of the Palazzo, the need arose to develop a rereading of these spaces and their visual narratives, one that can be attuned to the urgencies of the present. From this process emerged All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, a new filmic work by Isaac Julien, which reimagines the dynamics of transformation, interdependence, and metamorphosis that traverse bodies, images, and environments.

PALAZZO TE
AND THE FRUTTIERE

Palazzo Te, with its abundance of references to architecture, painting, natural sciences, mythology, and astrology, lends itself to a rich array of interpretations. Both a theatre and court, this Wunderkammer, cabinet of curiosities, provides a space for hospitality, symposium and wonder. It shares with Renaissance studies a ‘pansophic’ approach, a complete knowledge of the world unfolding through ancient myth, drawing on the vast repertoire of Ovid and his Metamorphoses.

The figure of Venus-Aphrodite dominates the positive celebration of humanity's transformation. The goddess of harmony, desire and instant visual knowledge, Venus inspires awe as she accompanies our journey together with other great deities and heroes, above all Jupiter, Hera, Eros, Hercules and Phaeton.

The palace can also be interpreted as the dream, artistic utopia and political agenda of two young men – Federico II, who was twenty-five, and Giulio Romano, who was in his thirties – belonging to the political and economic elite of the time. Two men exposed to the upheavals of the world around them, as well as to the richness of the extraordinary tradition of Italian humanism.

Giulio and Federico, two young men in the magnificent labyrinth of Palazzo Te, which conceals two powerful messages: in the Chamber of Love and Psyche, the prospect that the human soul, by combining abandonment to divine eros with great moral virtues, can ascend to a higher spiritual level. In the Chamber of the Giants, the hope that such transformed humanity, engaged in battle, can overcome all threats, withstand the earthquake and, relying on imperial power, restore peace.

Isaac Julien's installation will be presented in the renovated Fruttiere di Palazzo Te, which will reopen for the world premiere of the film.