Isaac Julien. Ten Thousand Waves

Isaac Julien’s moving image work Ten Thousand Waves (2010) was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in a specially conceived configuration for the museum’s atrium.

The immersive video, at that time a recent acquisition, could be viewed on nine double-sided screens hung salon-style in the huge space. Audiences were able to move freely around and watch the work from various vantage points, from the bridges or in front of the windows surrounding the atrium. The original inspiration for this moving image installation was the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which more than twenty Chinese cockle pickers drowned on a flooded sandbank off the coast in northwest England.