Looking for Langston, a solo show by Isaac Julien

About

In a work that unites poetry and image, Isaac Julien takes as point of departure a lyrical exploration of the private world of the African-American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and his fellow Black artists and writers who were part of the Harlem Renaissance – a cultural movement based on African-American cultural expressions that took place during the 1920s – to reflect on identity and sexuality. It is the film Looking for Langston (1989), currently screened as part of the exhibition Looking for Langston: I Dream a World, at Galeria Praça, Instituto Inhotim. 

The exhibition offers to the audience the full version of the film, photographs taken during shooting, as well as documents and a storyboard. Looking for Langston is one of the most iconic works of Isaac's career and a landmark of what American writer and critic B. Ruby Rich called the New Queer Cinema, which makes a direct link between images steeped in historical references of black-and-white African-American photography of the 1920s and the queer culture of the 1980s. 

Research around prominent 20th century personalities, such as Langston, is a constant element in Isaac Julien's work. The artist delves into the lives of these figures in order to revisit official historical narratives. In Hughes' case, Julien makes use of fiction to reflect and question the heteronormative aspect on which his figure was built, and also to demystify the stereotype of the Black American homosexual man who, back in the 1920s, could not express himself as he would like. "It's an attempt to fill in the gaps in history with fiction," says Douglas de Freitas, curator at Inhotim.  

Soon after its release in 1989, Greg Tate, an American writer and critic, described the film as the ‘first to consider the historical condition of being Black, gay, silenced, and incomprehensible.’