Isaac Julien’s “WESTERN UNION: Small Boats,” an exhibition at Metro Pictures, tells a troubled story of race and migration. Every year numerous Africans and Asians journey across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa to southern Europe in their quest for a better life. During the course of their voyage, the emigrants are often overstuffed into small boats that are left to drift aimlessly on the sea, and many end up dying from dehydration, starvation, or drowning, some of their bodies eventually becoming caught in the nets of Italian fishermen or washing ashore onto the beaches of Sicily. In recent years these desperate attempts to immigrate have increased, with shipwrecks and casualties escalating, prompting some to refer to this ongoing tragedy as the “Sicilian Holocaust.”

“WESTERN UNION” represents the third and final part of Julien’s trilogy “Cast No Shadow.” The first work, True North (2004), reexamines Robert E. Peary’s 1909 expedition to the North Pole, during which the African-American Matthew Henson was likely the first person to reach the Earth’s northern axial point. The second, Fantôme Afrique (2005), explores the marketplace of Ouagadougou and the desert landscape of Burkina Faso. Together, the three projects, all featuring the same actress, Vanessa Myrie, who also appears in Julien’s Baltimore (2003), serve as an odyssey, a series of journeys that addresses issues of race and displacement.

The trilogy was also included as part of the PERFORMA 07 biennial at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For that show, Julien teamed up with choreographer Russell Maliphant to create a dance theater event incorporating edited versions of the films with performances by Maliphant’s dance troop. Unfortunately, the final project read somewhat unevenly, lacking any consistent structure in the collaboration. The BAM version of True North was reworked such that the film and the dance were cleverly intertwined using beams of light. However, Fantôme Afrique, which featured a dancer on screen, oddly offered no live performance on stage. For “WESTERN UNION,” the film footage was heavily edited, allowing the dancers to become more prominent than the film, but the poignancy of the migrants’ story was then somewhat lost in the stylized choreography.

As an installation, “WESTERN UNION” provides a more provocative and poetic meditation on the trauma of the refugees’ flight from North Africa. Consisting of five screen projections and three duratrans (durable transparencies backlit by light boxes), the installation is divided into three rooms, organized in a non-sequential narrative style laden with symbolism that is characteristic of Julien’s work. The first room features a duratrans of Myrie standing as a silhouette inside an open gate that resembles a jail cell. She gazes out onto the calm blue waters of the Mediterranean, suggesting the possibility of freedom and hope. Meanwhile a screen on the other side of the room shows ongoing footage of mangled boats, a graveyard of vessels that symbolizes the all-too-likely disastrous outcome of the voyage across the marine divider between Africa and Europe.

In the second room, three screens are set side by side, the outer two angling slightly inward, resembling a Renaissance triptych. As he edited his film footage, Julien utilized the triptych format, often deciding to depict multiple views of the same action on different screens—from close up or far away and from different angles. He also sometimes allowed the action in one screen to move seamlessly onto the adjacent one. Set to music, the result is a sumptuous display of imagery that continuously arrests the viewer’s attention. The three screens show footage of distressed sun-drenched Africans clinging onto the sides of pitching boats, as well as Maliphant’s dancers simulating refugees drowning and then rolling down a staircase, their limp bodies ostensibly sinking to the bottom of the sea. Amid these images of distress, Julien interspliced scenes of Palermo’s ornate Palazzo Gangi, where Luchino Visconti filmed The Leopard (1963), and the tourist area of Scopello, where families play on the beach while the corpses of unsuccessful immigrants covered in silver sheets rot on the shore nearby. The juxtapositions are jarring, leaving viewers perplexed about Europe’s lack of sympathy regarding the issue of immigration. A duratrans featuring the ornate ceiling of the palazzo’s ballroom adds another possible layer of meaning. Painted in the ornate and dramatic style of the Sicilian Baroque, the ceiling displays trompe-l’oeil scenes of saints and angels floating in heaven as they watch the action below on Earth. We are reminded that the differences between Europe and Africa are largely marked not only by race, but religion as well, which may further explain the lack of effort to help these refugees.

In the last room, the third duratrans and the fifth screen depict the Scala dei Turchi (Turkish Steps), a smooth white rock formation that juts out from the coast of Sicily into the Mediterranean. The film shows two dancers undulating in and out of the niches of the chalky rock, their clothes and hair turning white in the process. The duratrans provides a panoramic view of the landscape with Mailphant’s dance troop walking up the hillside on the right and Julien’s film crew busily working on the left. Like many film directors, Julien reveals himself and his working process in the final display of his work.

Appearing in all three films of “Cast No Shadow,” Myrie represents Julien’s protagonist, but her role is much more complex than that of any standard heroine. Her striking features, her fierce stares, and her elegant stride are like those of a fashion model. Although some writers have referred to Myrie as Julien’s “muse,” he has countered this label, saying that it reduces her importance. He believes she represents “a female masculinity” that questions stereotypes of gender.¹ Her cropped hair, broad shoulders, and resolute demeanor both complement and contrast with her full-figured female body clad in a glimmering white gown.

In “WESTERN UNION,” Myrie plays the part of not one but several characters, signifying a composite of identities. In the lead role of Adriana, she seems to personify the Latin-based name meaning dark, rich, and bold. She also represents a survivor of one of the horrific boat journeys to which Julien refers in this project. During his extensive research, Julien interviewed a woman who was the sole survivor of a boat wreck in which some ninety people drowned. In addition, Myrie serves as Julien’s muted narrator, acting as an omniscient witness to the tales she observes.

Although Myrie is part of the action in the Palazzo Gangi, her striking presence makes her seem as if she has somehow transcended the action, much like the angels who float above her in the ceiling paintings of the lush ballroom. Her peculiar persona also reminds viewers that they are seeing an artistic film display, yet her power and forthright demeanor challenge viewers not to be overly seduced by the sumptuous cinematography and film editing. The message is clear: we are watching a troubled situation regarding race and migration.

Because Julien works in a nonlinear narrative style and often uses nonactors, he is free to complicate issues related to race. He uses real African immigrants for some scenes, especially those of the men cast adrift in the small boats, which directly link his work with the plight of the African Diaspora. Yet many of the migratory characters, especially those played by Maliphant’s dancers, represent various races. This allows Julien to make his message more universal, rather than being limited to the African experience. Issues related to the struggles of migration in various locales around the world might be conjured up depending on the individual background of the viewer. Regarding his message, Julien has stated, “I’m making work that may be addressing black figures or themes, but as far as I am concerned that is universal, because in the end we are all humans.”²

In one of the closing segments, Myrie bends down to pick up a dark shirt bobbing in the waves on the shore. She stands, holding the garment in her hand, and looks into the distance across the open sea. Who might this shirt belong to? What happened to the person who once embodied the garment? Her stoic beauty turns forlorn, as the camera pans down from her face to her hand holding the dripping garment. We are reminded that race and skin are merely external, worn like clothes, yet the impact and the distress they have caused in the world continue to be devastating. Julien recounted: “a good friend pointed out to me a long time ago, race is a fiction that racism keeps alive.”³

¹Isaac Julien, quoted in Martina Kudlácek, “Isaac Julien,” BOMB, no. 101 (Fall 2007): 75.
²Ibid., 78. See also Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “De Margin and De Center”; Julien, “Black Is, Black Ain’t: Notes on De-Essentializing Identities”; and idem, “Black British Cinema—Diaspora Cinema,” in The Film Art of Isaac Julien (Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Center for Curatorial Studies, 2000), 62-71, 73-77, 93-94.
³Julien, quoted in Kudlácek, “Isaac Julien,” 78.