Symmetry and opposition folded together and drawn  apart constitute the aesthetic focus of Isaac Julien's  Paradise Omeros, a three-screen video installation  exploring space, place and memory. The memory played out here is as much creole as it is philosophically and digitally baroque. It involves a mixing of cultures and languages characterized through the histories of slavery, colonialism, and contemporary capitalism-and appears in multiple temporal and  spatial frames, counterpoised and digitally folded  to create directional and perspectival tension. Autobiographical, without being concerned with  identity or identification, Paradise Omeros explores Creolité: the preserved diversities of original Caribbean asymmetrical politics and cultures. Creolité plays itself out here on three visual planes, with seams of  space and time folding in on each other, unable to maintain the centralization or prioritization typical of an iconic triptych. In its movement and narrative, the  installation is historical while eschewing teleology. [...]

Ranjana Khanna 


Catalogue excerpt
fast forward 2. The Power of Motion
Media Art Sammlung Goetz
Editors: Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek
Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz, 2010

Isaac Julien, Paradise Omeros, 2005
3-Kanal-Video-Installation
Installationsansicht ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst
Courtesy Sammlung Goetz
© Isaac Julien
Foto: ONUK