Now on view at the ICA at VCU, Julien Creuzet: Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon (through February 22, 2026) plunges audiences into a submerged cosmos of history, myth, and invention. Acting Senior Curator Amber Esseiva describes it as a world where monuments drift, plastic waste mingles with coral, and memory floats upside down, unmoored from its usual weight.
Turning Monuments on Their Head
“In a way, Julien is creating his own language,” Esseiva says. That language begins with the monumental. In the gallery, videos like Streetlights Ronde des Amours and Neptune Palazzo Dogale present 15-minute loops of classical figures submerged, their weight undone in a tidal world. “He takes these heavy Western monuments and plunges them into the ocean, where they float, inverted,” Esseiva explains. “There’s a wonder and a buoyancy to his work, and an open-endedness that invites the mind to wander”.
The Ocean as Trauma and Possibility
Esseiva stresses that Creuzet’s ocean is never singular. “It’s both the water as a site of trauma, a site of deep decay from our use, and a site of creative possibility and its buoyancy”. This tension surfaces in works like Sea Turtle and Fish Aggregating Devices (both 2024), which place marine life and colonial imagery in uncanny dialogue. Elsewhere, an iPhone bobs past Neptune; a cherub drifts with plastic bags. These images, Esseiva notes, are deliberate: “Why would someone so interested in water and the natural world include so much digitality? Because this is the visual language we all understand now through film, through video games, through screens.”
Hybrid Materials, Hybrid Worlds
The exhibition is not only digital. Sculptural works like Distant, the oral songs of youth buried… (2020) are built from metal, plastic, glue, even pineapple. Hanging fiber sculptures suggest coral reefs, ritual costumes, or roots suspended in water. We could see ourselves, ventilate… struck by the invigorating heat of the three thunderbolts (2023) blends acrylic paint, plastic, and fabric, collapsing boundaries between painting and assemblage. For Esseiva, these choices embody the Caribbean idea of creolization, the mixing of cultures, languages, and mythologies under colonial pressure.
Sound as a Tide
A two-hour soundscape flows through the gallery, shifting from jazz to club rhythms to lyrical chant. Creuzet’s voice, singing poetry in Creole, French, and English, merges with collaborator Ana Pi’s choreography, creating what Esseiva calls the “pulse of the show.” On October 10, Creuzet and Pi will bring that pulse to life in a special performance at the ICA, expanding the exhibition into live movement.
Why Richmond?
For Esseiva, the exhibition’s presence here carries weight. “These biennials dictate what is happening in the contemporary art world,” she says. “But they remain inaccessible to the general public that can’t travel to them. We have a mission to bring those global perspectives and conversations here.”
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