Film directed by Stephen Isaac-Wilson for Victoria Miro Gallery
Artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien and Pulitzer Prize winning critic and author Hilton Als first met in the late 1980s, when Julien was researching his seminal film Looking for Langston. Als went on to become one of the writers of the 1989 film, which is a lyrical exploration of the private world of poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) and his fellow black artists and writers who formed the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s.
“I think that one of the things that linked us was that we were really looking for something that explained how we had come to be…” Hilton Als
On the occasion of Julien’s exhibition of photographic works “I dream a world” Looking for Langston, at Victoria Miro (until 29 July 2017), they discuss the genesis of the film, their shared love of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, the work’s relationship to black gay desire, to AIDS and to questions of discrimination, and how, as Julien says, “these questions return to haunt the present.”
Read more about the exhibition in i-D Magazine here.