Catalogues the recent critically acclaimed exhibition of Isaac Julien’s work at the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

Sir Isaac Julien (b 1960), one of the UK’s leading artists working in film and video, is celebrated for his poetic yet astutely political films and video installations that reflect on the intersection of power, politics and personal experience through the lens of identity, race and sexuality. Distinguished by their fusion of fact and fiction, social critique and aesthetic immersion, his video installations offer poetic meditations on catalytic political and cultural events that have shaped the lives of individuals and societies around the world. His work breaks down the barriers between different artistic disciplines, melding references to cinema, art, poetry, performance and music into spellbinding political allegories that challenge our understanding of histories, both past and present.

Isaac Julien: I Dream a World accompanies the first comprehensive retrospective of this renowned artist and filmmaker in the United States. Centering ten of the artist’s key works shot across the Americas, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Europe, this volume situates his work within a global context. Provocative essays by a roster of contemporary writers and lavish galleries that feature multiple views of Julien’s work further mark this as an indispensable book on the artist and the subject of art history today.

Claudia Schmuckli is Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Known for coining the term ‘New Queer Cinema’, B. Ruby Rich is a Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Hilton Als is a staff writer and theatre critic for The New Yorker. Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archeology at the University of Oxford.