Julien’s 2022 five-screen film installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die) explores the relationship between Albert C. Barnes, an early collector of African art, and Alain Locke, the Harlem Renaissance instigator and proponent of restitution, with all the sensuality that has become characteristic of the British artist’s work. The film was exhibited this year at the Whitney Biennial, New York, and MCA Australia, Sydney, where The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘in an age where so-called political and postcolonial art tends toward sermonising’, found the film ‘unexpectedly healing’. Julien’s work meditates on the sins of the past, finding balm in the intersection of race and sexuality, not least in Lessons of the Hour (2019), his cinematic portrait of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, which was shown for eight months in New York, first at Skidmore College’s Tang Museum and then at MoMA (Julien’s iconic Looking for Langston, 1989, is also currently on show there as part of the permanent collection). Meanwhile, Julien became Fellow of the British Academy this year, and his survey exhibition, What freedom is to me, travelled to Bonnefanten, Maastrich.