On September 6, the ARoS art museum will open an exhibition dedicated to renowned film and installation artist Isaac Julien. His latest work can be seen in the show Isaac Julien – Once Again ... (Statues Never Die) in Aarhus.
In the half-hour film installation Once Again ... (Statues Never Die) (2022), artist Isaac Julien explores Alain Locke, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. The poetic work examines how the term »African art« was interpreted by European museums, based on Locke's exchange with Alfred C. Barnes, a key collector of cultural artifacts from Africa. The ARoS exhibition in Aarhus, curated by Ellen Drude Skeel Langvold and named after the work, is the first presentation of the work in Denmark. Julien's film installation is one of ARoS's most significant new acquisitions in recent years. The exhibition opens on September 6, 2025, and runs until June 7, 2026.
Born in London in 1960, Julien is a multi-award-winning filmmaker and installation artist. However, his socially critical work also draws on media such as photography, painting, sculpture, music, and dance, with which he seeks to shed light on the many dark corners of cultural history. In 2002, he participated in documenta 11, and in 2022, he received the prestigious Kaiserring award from the city of Goslar. From 2009 to 2015, Julien was a professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. He commented on the poetic nature of his work as follows: »I'm interested in poetry. And in my work it's very much a sort of poetic quest for a language to express experiences which are part of the everyday experience of people like myself.«
She is a national heroine in Finland, but has only become known internationally in recent years: Helene Schjerfbeck fascinates with her original, simple style. For the first time, a major museum in the USA is presenting her work: Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck opens on December 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
From November 13 to 30, the Fremantle Biennale took place in Australia near Perth, focusing on site-specific contemporary art. Among the exhibiting artists was Raki Nikahetiya with a sensory installation about the intertwining of identity, displacement, and home.
