Why It Matters
The episode highlights how contemporary art can serve as a catalyst for urgent conversations about climate change, biodiversity loss, and the cultural narratives that shape our response to ecological collapse. By blending cutting‑edge technology with myth and science‑fiction, Julien’s work offers a compelling model for artists and audiences to envision sustainable futures, making the discussion especially relevant as societies grapple with escalating environmental challenges.
Key Takeaways
- •Julien's multi-screen installation merges film, sculpture, and sound.
- •Themes explore ecology, climate change, and sci-fi mythology.
- •Casting female leads critiques patriarchal fresco narratives.
- •Collaboration with Santa Cruz eco-philosophers informs narrative.
- •Redwoods and seahorses symbolize timeless nature and metamorphosis.
Pulse Analysis
Isaac Julien’s latest work, "All That Changes / Metamorphosis," occupies the Victoria Miro gallery as a sprawling multi-screen video installation that fuses film, sculpture, sound, and performance. Drawing on his early training at St. Martin’s and decades of collaborative practice, Julien enlists a team that includes editor Adam Finch, cinematographer Jess Hall, and co‑writer Mark Nash. The technical feat of synchronizing dozens of screens and integrating live‑action footage with digital effects showcases a level of production complexity rarely seen in contemporary art, positioning the piece at the intersection of fine art and cinematic storytelling.
The installation interrogates pressing ecological concerns through a layered narrative that weaves climate change, Ovid’s metamorphosis myth, and speculative science‑fiction. Influences from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, Octavia Butler’s prophetic prose, and eco‑feminist thought in Santa Cruz inform the script, while quotations from Ursula K. Le Guin and Naomi Mitchison punctuate the visual flow. Sequences of redwood forests, microscopic seahorses, and a lone dog serve as visual metaphors for the planet’s fragile continuity, urging viewers to contemplate humanity’s role within a broader ecological chain of being.
Gender politics and historical critique also drive the piece’s impact. By casting Gwendolyn Christie and Sheila Atim as dual protagonists, Julien subverts the masculine dominance of Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te frescoes, replacing Zeus with powerful female figures. This deliberate recasting, combined with the work’s immersive mirroring and gaze‑troubling installation design, challenges patriarchal narratives and invites audiences to reconsider notions of power, violence, and renewal. In doing so, Julien creates an artwork that resonates beyond its 500‑year anniversary context, offering a timeless meditation on truth, transformation, and the urgent need for ecological empathy.
Episode Description
Robert meets Sir Isaac Julien at Victoria Miro gallery in London to explore 4 decades of making art. We also meet Julien’s long term collaborator Mark Nash to explore his major five-screen film installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, 2025 and new photographic works.
All That Changes You. Metamorphosis is a vivid, sweeping, visual poem about change, what it means to transform, to adapt and to survive. Commissioned to celebrate 500 years of Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy (where it is currently on view) and exhibited here for the first time as a five-screen installation, Julien’s latest work moves between science fiction, philosophy, ecology and art, imagining new forms of life and identity beyond the human.
All That Changes You. Metamorphosis draws inspiration from thinkers who explore how transformation shapes who we are and how we live, including writers Octavia Butler, Naomi Mitchison, Ursula K. Le Guin and philosopher Donna Haraway. Their ideas weave through the film’s layered images and lyrical dialogue. Two protagonists are at the heart of the film, played by internationally acclaimed actors Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie.
Isaac Julien is as acclaimed for his fluent, arresting films as for his vibrant and inventive gallery installations. One of the objectives of his work is to break down the barriers that exist between different artistic disciplines, drawing from and commenting on film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture, and uniting them to construct a powerfully visual narrative.
Julien came to prominence in the film world with his 1989 drama-documentary Looking for Langston, gaining a cult following with this poetic exploration of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. During the past three decades he has made work largely, though not exclusively, for galleries and museums, using multi-screen installations to express fractured narratives exploring memory and desire.
Julien’s major film installations include Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die), 2022, commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in celebration of its centennial, an immersive five-screen installation exploring the relationship between Dr Albert C. Barnes, who was an early US collector and exhibitor of African material culture, and the famed philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke, known as the ‘Father of the Harlem Renaissance’; Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass, 2019, a meditation on the life, words, and actions of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the visionary African American abolitionist and freed slave, and on the issues of social justice that shaped his life’s work; Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement, 2019, reflecting on the iconic work and on the legacy of the visionary modernist architect and designer (1914–1992); PLAYTIME, 2014, which explores the dramatic and nuanced subject of financial capital; Ten Thousand Waves, 2010, exploring China's ancient past and rapidly transforming present through a series of interlocking narratives.
Mark Nash is an independent curator, film historian, and filmmaker with a specialisation in contemporary avant-garde and world cinema. He is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), where he founded the Isaac Julien Lab@with his partner and long-time collaborator, artist Sir Isaac Julien. He has a PhD from Middlesex University and an MA from Cambridge University.
Follow @IsaacJulien
Isaac Julien’s major retrospective opens in Bergamo at gresart671 on 10th April 2026 and he will also showing a single screen version of All That Changes You. Metamorphosis at The Cosmic House in London from 22nd April, learn more here.
Special thanks to Victoria Miro gallery.
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