Once Again… (Statues Never Die) revisits and expands on these themes; it dramatises a dialogue between Locke (played by André Holland) and Albert C. One could simply perambulate from path to path (with different carpet colors) watching the movies in this space, devoid of any sense of time. Locke (and Julien) dream of restitution, and of something beyond, conveyed by the work’s lasting image of Locke in crisp tuxedo amid falling snow. There’s something divine in that moment when very little has to be uttered, yet so much vim and determination are produced when I’m with other Black people, striving for better, knowing our shared histories.

Elsewhere Moonlight actor André Holland, playing Locke, stands outside a snowbound Barnes Foundation as he speaks a voiceover. Sheltered from a deadening snowfall, Alain Locke, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance (played by Moonlight’s André Holland), strolls through the halls of a museum to the mournful soprano tones of jazz singer Alice Smith, and gazes up at statues of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Joseph Priestley and Roger Bacon to a lyrical narration in Creole, “a language not meant to be understood by the white master, a language of resistance,” Julien explains. A Regency dandy dances through the convoluted spaces of Sir John Soane’s Museum, apparently observed only by a black curator (the voiceover is in Creole, as if Julien did not want you to comprehend). The beauty of the landscape and the cool colour palette make room for contemplative and spiritual viewing.The approach is in line with a theory of a mobile spectator that the artist has been developing in his practice, pushing the boundaries of how audiences engage with film and installation art. The effect of such framing provides nuance to Julian’s play with time and the absurdity of singular truth. Here is A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), honouring the wild architecture of the Italian modernist Lina Bo Bardi, filmed across seven public buildings she designed for Brazil. One disappointment was the squeezing of four of his early 1980s films, produced as part of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, into the echoey corridor outside the entrance to the show, so that the textural experimentation and biting critique of Britain in Territories (1985) are difficult to hear and feel. On entering 2022’s ‘Once Again… (Statues Never Die)’ , Isaac Julien’s latest film here in this Tate Britain retrospective, you are plunged into a monochromatic art deco dreamspace: multiple large black-framed screens form a graceful semi-circle against a mirrored backdrop, leggy chrome vitrines housing sculptures punctuate the space.

This is a stunningly designed exhibition, curated intelligently to be an active one that asks us to partake in the narrative, not to be passive bystanders to history, to great effect. In a supplementary screening area outside the main cinematic rooms, one is reminded of what a bold and original artist Julien is in the presentation of seldom seen early works, including Who Killed Colin Roach (1983), made while Julien was still an art student.View image in fullscreen An installation view of Julien’s Once Again… (Statues Never Die), 2022 at Tate Britain. While the ten screens of Lessons of the Hour seek to imitate the disorienting variety of paintings of different size and genre one sees in a salon-style hang in a pre-Modernist gallery, Once Again…(Statues Never Die) uses five large screens, mylar wall mirroring, and the sculptures of Richmond Barthé and Matthew Angelo Harrison to generate a dystopian museum space. Looking for Langston was shown at the Barbican in 2020, and it was startling when Todd Terry’s 1988 acid house classic Can You Party?