Isaac Julien on Western Union Small Boats

London based artist Isaac Julien's multiscreen film installation WESTERN UNION: Small Boats, has recently been purchased by Martin Marguilles for his collection in Miami. The multi-screen film is about migration and examines the ways that certain bodies can't move easily from one location to another and the risks some people take to get a better life. Julien describes the work as concerning journeys made across the seas of the Mediterranean. The journeys and stories of so-called ''clandestines'' who leave Libya, escaping wars and famines. They can be seen as economic migrant workers, along with certain Europeans - Angels in Walter Benjamin's terms - who bear witness to modernity's failed hopes and dreams, and who now travel across oceanic spaces some never to arrive or return. He speaks to Jean Wainwright about this work and his career.

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