Victoria Miro has announced Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour, now on view at Perth Museum. The exhibition centres on Julien's acclaimed 2019 work Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass, a meditation on the life and legacy of the abolitionist and on his time in Scotland.

Unique to Perth, the presentation sets Julien's film installation within a wider exploration of Perthshire's connections to the transatlantic slave trade and of Douglass's own links to the region. Douglass, who escaped slavery in Maryland and became one of the nineteenth century's most influential campaigners against it, toured Scotland in the 1840s, lecturing to large audiences; the exhibition draws those historical threads into the present through Julien's immersive multi-screen language.

Julien, one of Britain's most distinguished artist-filmmakers, has spent four decades crafting seductive, rigorously researched moving-image installations that revisit overlooked figures and moments in Black history. A Turner Prize winner in 2001, Julien has shown his multi-screen works at biennials and museums worldwide. Lessons of the Hour is characteristic of that method: archival research, staged re-enactment and lyrical cinematography combined into an enveloping viewing experience that refuses to treat the past as settled.

The Perth showing continues a busy institutional run for the artist, whose film installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, conceived for the Uccelliera at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, opened in September. For Perth Museum, the exhibition offers a locally rooted encounter with a global story, placing Scotland's own entanglement with slavery's history inside the frame of Julien's film installation on Douglass.