Isaac Julien: All That Changes You. Metamorphosis

The Cosmic House is delighted to present a site-specific installation of All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, a new moving-image work by acclaimed British artist Isaac Julien. The film, premiered at The Cosmic House as a single-screen version, offers a visually poetic meditation on transformation. Created by Julien in close collaboration with his long-term partner Mark Nash, the work traces change across ecological, temporal, and cultural realms, emphasising relationality and continuity rather than linear progression. Charles Jencks' Cosmic House appears within the work alongside California’s redwood forests, the Herzog and De Meuron Kramlich Collection in Napa Valley, The Richard Found house in the Cotswolds, and Giulio Romano’s frescoed interiors of Palazzo Te—distinct environments that actively shape experience, perception, and the flow of time. 

All That Changes You. Metamorphosis draws on feminist science fiction and critical theory, referencing Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison, and Donna Haraway. Haraway’s voice opens the work with a passage from Staying with the Trouble, establishing an ethical framework grounded in coexistence, interdependence, and care. The film follows two protagonists, Lilith and Naomi, played by Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie, as they move through landscapes and architectures. The structure is shaped by observation, recurrence, and encounter, situating individual experience within broader cosmologies and ecologies through an elliptical narrative. Human presence appears in relation to non-human life, planetary processes and built environments.

Originally conceived as a ten-screen installation that premiered in Mantua for the 500th anniversary of Palazzo Te, the single-screen version of the work reimagines the original installation through Julien’s encounter with The Cosmic House, responding to the architecture and concepts embodied in it. The Cosmic House integrates scientific, mythological, and philosophical systems, presenting cosmology as a cultural and historical construct. The gallery at The Cosmic House features an epigraph by Charles Jencks on the mythic and scientific significance of the sun, lines which are quoted in the film, contextualising scientific inquiry with spiritual belief and ecological awareness, and framing the sun as a recurring symbol of energy, life, death and transformation. This site-specific installation of All That Changes You. Metamorphosis foregrounds The Cosmic House as an architectural model of the universe with many centres, emphasising layered, non-linear time and inviting reflection on duration, cyclical return, and ecological responsibility.

Eszter Steierhoffer, director of The Cosmic House, said: “Isaac Julien’s film transforms the house into a multi-temporal and symbolic space, revealing architecture as a way of thinking about time, change, and cosmology. This site-specific presentation offers a unique encounter with history, imagination, and continuity through film and architecture. In drawing viewers into a flow of transformation, Julien’s work arrives at a principle shared with Jencks: our understanding of the cosmos is relational, shaped by time, culture, and perspective.”

For media enquiries, please contact: Matthew Brown, matthew@sam-talbot.com