Isaac Julien, "O que é um museu? / What is a Museum? (Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement)," 2019. Endura Ultra photograph facemounted. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery ©The Artists.
Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi - A Marvellous Entanglement
Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement is an exciting tribute to the legendary Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi by the British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien. In this nine-screen film installation, Julien examines Bo Bardi’s life and work through dramatic enactments of her words and ideas performed amid her most prized buildings.
Filmed in several locations in Brazil, including the São Paulo Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Bahia, and the Teatro Gregório de Matos in Salvador, the work acts as an open-ended reflection on the architect’s Brazilian projects from the 1960s to the 1980s. Bo Bardi’s life story is interpreted by Brazilian actresses Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, mother and daughter in real life, who portray the mature and the younger version of the Bo Bardi.
Isaac Julien, CBE RA (b. 1960) rose to fame in the art world in the late 1980s with his cinematic exploration of Black gay desire and the Harlem Renaissance in Looking for Langston. Over the last three decades, Julien has remained at the forefront of contemporary art by breaking down the barriers that exist between artistic disciplines and exploring themes such as history, narrative, race, Global South, and migration through the mediums of installation and filmmaking. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among other leading contemporary museums around the world and is held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide.
The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is the first U.S. museum to exhibit Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement. It was previously on view in Rome, Italy, at MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts.
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