In 2013, five years after the world has been convulsed by a global banking and financial crisis, Isaac Julien (b. 1960) premiered his film PLAYTIME to address an important question: Can capital be rendered visible? By following the stories of six protagonists - interconnecting figures in the world of art and finance - Isaac Julien subsequently found narrative images for the process of capital interlocking at a global level, intertwining a macroscopic and a microscopic perspective dialectically, as it were. The Palais Populaire and the Wemhoener Collection have joined forces to shed new light on PLAYTIME from today's perspective and to testify to the work's topicality, as capital as a medium plays into almost all political, social, and societal issues and influences the lives of nearly every human being on this planet. Texts by Zeigam Azizov, Philipp Bollmann, Anna Herrhausen, Isaac Julien. Design by Pit Stenckhoff, Anna Buehler, Flo Paizs, Neue Gestaltung, Berlin. Text in English and German. Filmmaker and installation artist, Isaac Julien KBE RA, was born in 1960 in London. Julien's recent international solo exhibitions include Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, 2022; Lessons of the Hour, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, USA, 2022; Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi - A Marvellous Entanglement, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte, NC, USA; Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi - A Marvellous Entanglement, CentroCentro (Panorama Madrid), Madrid, Spain (2021); Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour, McAvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco (2020?2021); Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi - A Marvellous Entanglement, MAXXI, Rome (2020?2021); Isaac Julien: Western Union: Small Boats, Neuberger Museum, New York (2020); Isaac Julien: Frederick Douglass: Lessons of the Hour, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2019); Looking for Langston at Tate Britain (2019); and Playtime at LACMA (2019). 35 colour illustrations
