Who Killed Colin Roach? at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam open Lessons of the Hour, 1983 (Who Killed Colin Roach?).  The installation, which combines archival photography with Julien's seminal 1983 film centering on the aftermath of the mysterious death of 23 year old East London youth, Colin Roach, entered into the Stedelijk's permanent collection this year.

Even though the police claimed Roach had commited suicide, evidence showed otherwise. Isaac Julien says that this work is essentially a response to the riots, an answer to certain fixed ways of looking at black cultures, but also at those ways we might feel about ourselves. 

According to Paul Gilroy, "Territories and Who Killed Colin Roach? are among the best documents with which we can explain why the conflicts of the 1980s arose and why they must now be examined again. Those battles made Britain into a different kind of society - a precarious, market society. The last few years have taught us that it will be a more militarised, more unequal formation entirely beyond the reach of courageous artistic interventions of this vintage type."