TILBURG.- Isaac Julien (London 1960) produced his first films in the early 1980s. Since then he has developed his own distinct idiom in which fact and fiction, aesthetics and critical reflection converge. For the past fifteen years Julien has been presenting his work in the context of museums, and the spatial setting of the projection plays a significant role. His recent film installation Playtime is a spectacular example of this. The work constitutes the core of Julien's exhibition at De Pont. In addition to this a group of eight films, shown in single-screen versions, provides a general view of his work from the past thirty years. Completing the exhibition are large photographic works, which came about in close connection with the films but which function as independent works of art.

In recent decades the moving image has become an integral part of the art we see in museums. Its potential, in terms of the scope that it can have in a museum, is demonstrated by Isaac Julien in Playtime (2013). Modest-looking video monitors, which made their timid debut in museum galleries around 1970, have now given way to an architectural formation of seven projection screens that take up the entire central exhibition space at De Pont. The razor-sharp images in full color bear little resemblance to the blurry greys of video images from the medium's early years. Whereas an artist such as Bruce Nauman adopted his studio as the location from which to shoot, in 1967, a frontal registration of intently executed body movements from a fixed vantage point, Julien has journeyed from London to Dubai and Reykjavik in order to tell stories, in both overwhelming and refined filmic images, about recklessness and desperation in the unsteady world of Big Money, which has embraced art as a popular investment.

While artists initially used photography and video mainly as a means to define visual art in new ways, Julien seems to be doing the reverse. He makes use of the museum space in order to offer new perspectives on the medium of film.

From the very start, his critical stance with regard to film was a major point of departure. In 1984 he founded Sankofa Film, a collective of socially committed black filmmakers who worked on the basis of the idea that black self-awareness required not only its own narratives, but its own visual language as well. "We're struggling to tell a story of black people. A his-story, a her-story of cultural forms specific to black people," says the off-screen narrator of his Territories, dating from that same year.

Over the past thirty years Julien's films have told stories about ethnic origins and social vulnerability, about sexuality and gender, about beauty and economic capital. Looking for Langston (1989), the film that established his reputation, goes back to 1930's Harlem and is an ode to the poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967), to jazz and the black gay culture. In Paradise Omeros (2002) a sense of displacement is implicit in the shots that switch back-and-forth between the island Saint Lucia and England, between the home country and the new country. In Western Union: small boats (2007) and Better Life (2010) the Sicilian beach and Morecambe Bay, on the northwest coast of England, are places where dreams for a better life, held by people from distant lands, literally fell apart. Vagabondia (2000) and Playtime confront the viewer with the culturally defined notion of beauty and bring him to the nineteenth-century Sir John Soane Museum in London and to the contemporary art world of the gallery and auction house.

As the son of Caribbean immigrants, as a black homosexual and as an artist, these are subjects that affect Julien; but equally important is the filmic language in which such themes are, and could be, portrayed. His films are consequently a reflection, too, on the medium itself. His work can never be said to involve only one narrative. He opens this up, often combining film images with historical film material and images from the media, exploring traditional genres such as the documentary and the motion picture, and frequently referring to other films and directors. (In Western Union: small boats he alludes to Luchino Visconti's Il Gattopardo (1963) and in Playtime to Jacques Tati's film of the same title from 1967.)

Polyphony is one significant aspect of his films; a rhythmic quality is another. It isn't a storyline but rather the rhythm of successive images and the sound that give his films their structure. Julien's film installations can perhaps be compared to musical compositions, in which various voices are brought together. This certainly holds true with respect to his recent installations Ten Thousand Waves and Playtime, which involve a three-dimensional setting of projection screens suspended throughout the space.

With Playtime, Julien says, he wished to create a work in which he holds up a mirror to himself, a work in which the camera focuses on the art world of which he himself is a part.

'It's a game!' shouts the art consultant, played by actor/artist James Franco, as his eye wanders along the gallery wall covered with paintings. Julien offers a critical but also satirical view of that game, which revolves around Big Money and is driven by the dynamics of the capital market. The deserted office of the Hedge Fund manager in London, the bustling activity on the floor of Dubai's stock exchange, the smile of the auctioneer who confirms a high bid with a tick of his hammer: they all relate to the invisible flow of capital, which can also severely affect the lives of ordinary people. We see this happening to the Icelandic photographer, who loses everything during the economic crisis of 2008, and to the lonely Philippine woman in Dubai who feels as though she is being held captive by her wealthy employer.

Here, as in all of his films, Julien intertwines fact and fiction. The characters are based on real people. The Icelandic photographer is a friend of his, and the Philippine woman who fled Dubai is now working for him as a maid. Their true stories are played out by actors, yet the half-finished modernist house in the Icelandic countryside is, in fact, the photographer's own dream house doomed to deterioration, just as the gallery in Playtime is the very one where Julien exhibits his work. Appearing in the film are well-known actors such as Colin Salmon and James Franco; the auctioneer, however, plays himself. In real life he is the renowned Simon de Pury. The self-confident Chinese reporter who interviews him is the actress Maggie Cheung, who plays the goddess in Better Life.

In a balanced visual language, Julien gives shape to that confusing tangle of fact and fiction. Percussion instruments reinforce the rhythmic nature of the images. Reflecting surfaces and panels of semitransparent glass serve as expressive motifs, while the landscape and the urban environment similarly become metaphors for lofty ambitions and dissolved illusions.

In Playtime Julien refers to the genre of the motion picture, but he breaks with its compelling realism. His film is a masterly composition in space and time, whose multiple levels elude observation in a single moment.