Juilian’s piece on the Italian modernist architect and designer and the many public buildings she designed for Brazil, Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), is a choreography and dance-focused piece.

Acclaimed as the first art film made about the historical condition of being both black and gay, this cult work glitters on continuous loop at the heart of the show, and if you start here something particular starts to emerge. The RA is a unique institution, an independent charity with a mission to be a clear, strong voice for art and artists, where art is made, exhibited and debated. The multi-screen is of course a well-established and effective means through which one can, quite literally, avail oneself of multiple readings of the same or similar – as well as deliberately contrasting – images. Julien’s fast and loose playing with time opens up this mourning to be a doorway onward, toward the joy and beauty and dancing of resistance, and freedom. Not infrequently, the viewer encounters the same image, presented at varying angles that are often slightly out of sync with one other.

For the purposes of this review, I am going to focus on just two of them, which examine the lives and work of John Soane and Lina Bo Bardi respectively. However, as broad and layered as Julien’s diasporic excavations might be, such works as Ten Thousand Waves centre on additional narratives. Flitting between reenactments of Bo Bardi in her younger self and Bo Bardi herself through repeated and mirrored statements, different versions of Bo Bardi simultaneously utter statements reinforce the marvellously entangled nature of time. He includes existing footage of Barthé, moments from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s seminal film Statues Never Die (1953) and Ghanaian film-maker Nii Kwate Owoo’s 1970 footage of African objects in the British Museum, alongside stunning original sequences.

This ambitious solo exhibition reveals the scope of Julien’s pioneering work in film and installation from the early 1980s through to the present day. The beauty of the British countryside which falsifies comfort throughout, only to then whiplash to the dangling of strange fruit, cotton, and imagery of traumatic histories of slavery. He has said of “Looking for Langston,” an iconic piece from 1989, “Before I was looking, I was listening. Rediscovered prints Julien took on the day of the protest form a collage along a wall of the studio.They wander through her art museum, where the paintings project from resin bases like gravestones in a cemetery, down spiralling staircases, followed by dancers in descending flurries, through Bo Bardi’s São Paulo theatre with its bare wooden seats.

This interconnectedness is palpable throughout the exhibition, from the collaborators with whom Julien (a 2021 Wallpaper* Design Awards judge) has worked throughout his career to the themes that recur via his own timeline; histories and narratives are questioned in a way that informs but never feels didactic.This exhibition has been designed in partnership with architect David Adjaye, and together, Julien explains, they sought to create “an invitation to become enveloped by the images”. View image in fullscreen An installation view of Julien’s Once Again… (Statues Never Die), 2022 at Tate Britain.