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. Using distinctly Soanian techniques of reflection, doubling, shadow and allusion the film evokes the repressed histories of the artefacts. The photography and films at the Tate are amazing to see individually while powerful when viewed collectively. Although the legacies of slavery are still felt today, financially and socially, something about looking back to that time to a Black viewer can have a sense of ‘here we go again’.

The Isaac Julien retrospective, What Freedom Means to Me, currently showing at Tate Britain, includes six films selected from across his more than thirty-year career. Although the rest of the show is clear in sentiment and message, Julien’s early works appear more unapologetic, unabashed and very routed in the politicisation of Blackness, queerness and London. The beauty of the landscape and the cool colour palette make room for contemplative and spiritual viewing. In fact, he remembers getting together with Hanif Kureishi, whose film London Kills Me had also been recently released, and discussing what they felt was an unfair reception of their work. Julien’s critical thinking, aimed above all at an intense engagement with the culture and history of colonialism, is expressed in his early films, as well as in the highly aesthetic film images of the major, internationally acclaimed video installations of the last twenty years.

Isaac Julien’s canalside London studio was designed by David Adjaye at the same time the architect was working on his National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC; its library space, where we talk, is warm, luxurious and boat-like. At the time, the Notting Hill Carnival provided a perfect storm of class, race, labour, and sexuality to be a site of resistance and was therefore placed under the microscope of the police. In 1989, he debuted his short film, Looking for Langston, which explores the world of Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance through the lens of playwright Langston Hughes. Colin Roach was a young Black man who died inside a police station in what can understatedly and undisputedly be described as suspicious circumstances. What Freedom Is To Me is a heavily choreographed experience presenting the viewer, one must assume, with the body of work and style of production that the artist and curators want to have make the greatest impact.

Ten Thousand Waves, featuring Maggie Cheung as Mazu, is a collaboration with the Chinese poet Wang Ping, whom Julien met in 2006 and brought to Morecambe Bay; she produced a poem that “became instructional of the work”. conceived as a response to the unrest following the death of the 21-year-old Black Londoner who died from a gunshot wound inside the entrance of Stoke Newington police station that year. For example, the full-grown glowing and smiling queer cherubs in Looking for Langston are avatars of the immortality of subversive gay culture in the face of the constant tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, whose scourge was at its height when Julien made the film in 1989. 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.

His tutor encouraged him to think about how Black gay men are stereotyped, and this question indirectly led to Looking for Langston. 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. Vagabondia, created in 2000, is set in the Soane Museum in Central London, and imagines – through the eyes of a black female curator, the invisible histories of the artefacts and the legacy of the vast undertaking of their extraction and relocation to the UK (of which the Soane Museum is a small but notable example).