Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea
Museu do Chiado

The installation of Isaac Julien WESTERN UNION: Small Boats opens at the National Museum of Contemporary Art - Museum of Chiado the 2008 edition of the Festival Temps d'Images. This partnership, already held in previous years, brought to this museum exhibitions of Anri Sala (2007), Sharon Lockhart (2006), William Kentridge (2005) and Luciana Fina (2004).

Julien’s new work, WESTERN UNION: Small Boats concerns journeys made across the seas of the Mediterranean. The journeys and stories of so-called “clandestines” who leave Libya, escaping wars and famines. They can be seen as economic migrant workers, along with certain Europeans – Angels in Walter Benjamin’s terms – who bear witness to modernity’s failed hopes and dreams, and who now travel across oceanic spaces some never to arrive or return.