Victoria Miro is delighted to present the world premiere of the five-screen installation of Isaac Julien’s acclaimed film installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, accompanied by new photographic works.
All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, 2025, is a vivid, sweeping, visual poem about change, what it means to transform, to adapt and to survive. Commissioned to celebrate 500 years of Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy (where it is currently on view) and exhibited here for the first time as a five-screen installation, Julien’s latest work moves between science fiction, philosophy, ecology and art, imagining new forms of life and identity beyond the human.
The work is accompanied by an extensive new essay by Lorenzo Giusti, Director, GAMeC, Bergamo and curator of Isaac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, Palazzo Te. In addition, the photographic works on view feature commentary by Vladimir Seput.
'Julien constructs a path that does not follow linear logic, but a temporal choreography in which the places themselves transform (or transform those who pass through them).’
– Lorenzo Giusti
All That Changes You. Metamorphosis draws inspiration from thinkers who explore how transformation shapes who we are and how we live, including writers Octavia Butler, Naomi Mitchison, Ursula K. Le Guin and philosopher Donna Haraway. Their ideas weave through the film’s layered images and lyrical dialogue.
Two protagonists are at the heart of the film, played by internationally acclaimed actors Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie. Atim’s character, Lilith, is inspired by two of Octavia Butler’s heroines, combined into one mythic figure who embodies transformation. Opposite her is Naomi, portrayed by Christie and loosely based on Naomi Mitchison’s science fiction novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman. While Lilith speaks from a posthuman future, Naomi remains grounded in the human present, searching for new ways to connect.
‘Lilith’s phrase “all that you touch you change, and all that you change, changes you” also applies to the viewer: watching means being involved, traversed, altered.’
– Lorenzo Giusti
The work also draws on contemporary ecological and philosophical thinking from scholars such as Anna Tsing and Carlo Rovelli. Rovelli’s conception of time as something that does not flow independently but instead emerges from a web of relationships resonates with Haraway’s sense of interconnectedness, her insistence that all beings are entangled in shared processes of becoming. Together, these ideas are felt rather than stated, embodied in the rhythms of the film and in the ways Lilith and Naomi move, speak, and encounter their changing environments.
Presented across five screens within a mirrored environment, the installation encourages multiple viewpoints. Scenes overlap, dissolve, are reflected and reappear. Dialogue becomes poetry and time folds in on itself. The work does not provide solutions or complete answers, instead asking us to inhabit change, to see transformation as part of what it means to be alive. Time is now measured by the rhythms of earth, air, and fire. Isaac Julien invites us to look at the world in motion, and to imagine how we might change with it.
