PLAYTIME, Isaac Julien, Victoria Miro Gallery

This month, acclaimed East-London born filmmaker Isaac Julien unveils his newest work, PLAYTIME: a bold cinematic installation project split across the Victoria Miro Gallery’s Hoxton and Mayfair branches. 

PLAYTIME consists of three film pieces and a series of photographic stills that explore the effect of the 2008 recession on capital, art and individuals in three cities. A complex, multi-layered piece with a fractured narrative, its subject matter belies its title. But don’t let the gravity put you off.

Julien acts as a reporter, filmmaker and interviewer in one, exploring the degree to which real people are interconnected by and entangled in the fraught financial systems that caused the crisis: in Reykjavik, the city where it first began; London, a metropolis in the thrall of deregulated banks; and Dubai, one of the most newly affluent cities in the world. It’s a bold, daring exploration of a topic that in many individual cases is still raw. 

Julien has been a hot topic as an artist and filmmaker since the 1990’s, and, on the success of his Turner Prize nominated film project The Long Road to Mazatlán in 2001, has held successful one-man exhibitions all over the world. 

2013 was a good year for him: every midnight throughout December, PLAYTIME was shown on the billboards of New York’s iconic Times Square, and in November his immersive film Ten Thousand Waves (2010) opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This project is a beautiful juxtaposition of ancient Chinese myth with the reality of a modern, globalised China, projected onto a polygon of double-sided screens - a technique Julien brings back in PLAYTIME. 

Julien certainly doesn’t settle for the conventional cinematic experience, and his approach to film has been compared with the renowned director-artist, Derek Jarman, whom he first met in 1981 and shares as an influence with scores of Britain’s most esteemed artists. And it seems the respect went both ways: Julien collaborated with Jarman for his 2008 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, Brutal Beauty, which featured Oscar winning actress Tilda Swinton.